I think you are underestimating how novel those things were 20 years ago. The NYT has been ahead-of-the-curve when it comes to the sophistication of their webpage for about that long. Perhaps their language helped.
It is pretty cool that they created their own language, but I was not sure if they really needed to do that. I guess it was worth it back then. Looking at their website in 2002[0] it is pretty impressive indeed.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020209001700/https://www.nytim...