2 ms·

Yes. Web applications were impossible before these libraries.

• jacquesm 11mo ago
  No, they were not. They required a lot more round-trips to the server though, and rendering the results was a lot harder. But if you think of a browser as an intelligent terminal there is no reason why you couldn't run the application server side and display the UI locally, that's just a matter of defining some extra primitives. Graphical terminals were made first in the 60's or so.
• Levitating 11mo ago
  If you truly believe that than we must really be moving backwards
  • jeroenhd 11mo ago
    I think they have a point, before cgi-bin it was almost impossible to have a real web application. It took a decade for server-side rendering to fall out of favour. Flash websites and Gmail starting to become seriously interactive in the mid 2000s were the start of frontend-first web applications, but even those relied on the backend to provide them with an initial data set to make performance usable.