[steego]

They really weren't a thing, but they also weren't unheard of. Personally speaking, I started working on a complex JavaScript application (web-based ERP/CRM system) in 2000. While it wasn't an SPA, we designed our pages so you didn't have to leave them to do what you needed to do. For example, a user might stay on one page for a few hours because they're speccing out a project.

Updates were often committed live using remote scripting (A precursor to AJAX) and we did a lot of DOM manipulation to update content in-place. At that time, we targeted IE because Netscape's support for DOM manipulation was abysmal.

While I have to give Gmail credit where it's due, I have to give Firefox the real credit for doing the hard work and finally releasing an alternative to IE that kicked JavaScript into high gear. If Gmail had never happened, it would have only been a matter of time before SPAs were going to become a thing. There were more of us doing it before Gmail than most people realize.

[Darkphibre]

Oh my goodness. Flashbacks to an web app I was coding up for Universal Studios Music Group back in '99. It leveraged Visual Basic DCOM components hosted in Microsoft Transaction Server. I took over the UI from a dev that was extremely behind, and in a week threw together a fancy UI with a pop-up menu and some other asynchronous interaction concepts (later AJAX / REST provided the abstractions to make it easy).

That was a fun, well-paid project with lots of (non-exempt) overtime. Then the .com bubble popped.

[skinnymuch]

Should Microsoft get credit for inventing Ajax and having the first real world functioning example of it?

[steego]

They do deserve some credit for intentionally introducing that feature to the browser as a standard feature, but the notion of fetching data without reloading the page wasn't novel at all.

That's what Java applets and plugins were for.

I'm also pretty sure they weren't the first to fetch data from the server without reloading, because people were doing all sorts of novel things in the mid-90s with plugins.

The reason it didn't really take off back then wasn't because of vision. It was because there was so little you could do with JavaScript. The browsers were still implementing the basic features and a lot of page/component manipulation was very broken. Applets and plug-ins were so much more capable.

[stan_rogers]

Loading into a hidden or pixel-sized iframe (or ilayer in NS) was a thing before XMLHttpRequest as well. In what would now seem a scary technique, you would use JS to load more JS (plus data, of course) that would put the new data into the iframe's host page.

[steego]

I used Remote Scripting as well. It was a reliable enough hack that we built a lot of stuff on it. But I don’t think it was intended to be used that way when Netscape released JavaScript in ‘95.

[mark-r]

I remember when Java first came out. It seemed like a new and improved C++ and I was intrigued. When it became clear that it was being positioned as purely an applet language I lost all interest.

Then along came Javascript with its transparent attempt to ride the coattails of Java by adopting a similar name. No interest in that either.

[steego]

You're right that Java was being promoted as a front-end language at first (Sun found a customer for Java), but I'm pretty sure the intent was to generate excitement by finding a killer app and then expand the market from there.

Also, Java applets and JavaScript were added to Netscape 2.0 at the same time and were meant to complement each other, not compete. It may seem like Java came first because JavaScript was called LiveScript for the first three months. I also don't think the JavaScript name change was intended to ride the coattails of Java, rather it was clarify and harmonize its relationship to Java.

I still look back and I'm amazed at how much stuff happened between the summer of '95 and winter '96. Windows 95 release. Netscape went public. 2.0 released 1 month later introducing Java and JavaScript, etc. etc. etc.

[mark-r]

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that my reaction was any kind of truth about the situation. I'm just recalling the thoughts I can remember from that time, hoping that they have some relevance.

[steego]

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to correct you as much as add color for other HN readers. So much happened in a very short period of time and I hope that people take away how much vision and strategy these people had at that time.

I think the point I'm really trying to make is that the Netscape team had a much richer vision of the web than what we use today. Before they built Netscape, Andreessen and Clark were considering building an online gaming platform. I'm sure you remember how big multimedia was back then.

If you look at the timeline, you can see where the were going. They started off with a focus on dominating the browser market, which they did in 4 months. In less than a year after their first release, they released the first version of an online platform. It added Java, JavaScript, and a plug-in architecture with standard plug-ins like Live3D so you could embed VRML into your HTML page. No one was even sure HTML wasn't going to be replaced by something better, so I have to imagine they were hedging their bets by adding three different ways to build on their platform.

If anything, I think your original comment reinforces that strategy. They knew there were a lot of C++ developers who wouldn't take to Java for whatever reason, so they offered a plug-in architecture for people who cared more about performance and experience than being cross-platform.

Had things gone differently (Microsoft not woken up), I can easily see Netscape creating a dominant internet platform that went beyond HTTP and viewing hyperlinked documents. They were already bundling email, website editors, conferencing, news clients, etc.

[tasogare]

> The browsers were still implementing the basic features

And they are still doing it. CSS Grid is not even 3 years old.

[mr_toad]

> Applets and plug-ins were so much more capable.

Except that they couldn’t alter the DOM, or handle events on DOM elements, the two things that developers really needed (even if they didn’t know it).

[steego]

So the DOM was introduced in 1998, three years after applets and plugins. In 1995, you could write JavaScript code to dynamically render a page on load using document.write, but updating the rendered HTML was another story. Otherwise, JavaScript was limited to very very simple things.

When DHTML was introduced in '97-'98, the only major browser that had a reliable DOM was IE until Firefox came around in 2002. Netscape tried, but it was buggy to the point where there were no real workarounds to the huge gaps in missing functionality.

As far as 1995 was concerned, applets and plugins looked like the future. Honestly, the web was so new and so inferior to other things in 1995 (Macromedia, WYSIWYG tools, etc.), I think most of us saw HTML being replaced in a few years by a richer clients, applets or plugins.

[weq]

Thats why people wrote Applets. Even if u wanted manipulate the dom (u could), u didnt, because the Applet was so much faster and more feature rich.

[thedance]

What did you need plugins for? Netscape and MSIE both were able to add a script tag to the DOM dynamically, and that was all you needed to build the rest of it.

[steego]

You were able to use document.write somewhat dynamically, but the not reliably across all the browsers. Even if you did make an RPC call, there wasn't a lot you could do with it presentation wise because DHTML was two years away. (Even then, IE was the only one who had a decent implementation for a number of years after that.)

Plugins and applets filled a huge gap functionality wise.

[thedance]

You must have been before me. NN and MSIE 4 both had what we now call DOM Level 1, in 1997.

[steego]

My recollection at the time was IE4 had a working DOM while Netscape's DOM was buggy and left a lot to be desired. It was there, but it was a struggle.

I don't say that to crap on Netscape. Microsoft was a well-funded company with a lot of experts who had years of experience create applications with DOMs. Also, they had the luxury of delivering a browser for one operation system.

Netscape was a brand new company that went public 7 months after it's first release and 1.5 years after its founding. They sold investors the premise they were going to become the Microsoft of the internet. They had a fraction of the resources while they were trying to creating browsers, email clients, collaboration software, web server, and a host of other software for multiple platforms.

[agumonkey]

in 2004 a guy gave a talk about how they wrote large js apps, probably 1999-2000. they made a sturdy full fledged toolkit with nice prototypes. but at the time everything was in house

[steego]

That's exactly why we were able to use it. For a while, we were IE only, but then we started to support Firefox (Only because the developers were fans and we started recommending it to users).