[ethbr0]

It's easy to look backwards, with the benefit of more robust and fast (relatively!) standards bodies, and shake a finger.

But my memory at the time is that there were essentially no effective, consensus-based evolutions of web standards, because everything was so new.

Even the idea of running executable code in a browser at all was "That's weird. Is this a thing we want to do?" and resulted in 10+ variations (of which javascript ultimately triumphed).

It was certainly a worse time for the consumer, and web developer, as essentially everything was broken on every platform but your target w/ your target plugin installs.