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by zozbot234 1852 days ago
Yup. Browsers used to render all pages incrementally, so you could simply keep the HTTP connection open and add more HTML text to the page, and it would just get tacked on to the bottom. Then you had a CGI endpoint in a separate footer frame (sort of like an iframe but arranged in a Grid-like layout) with a "Read More..." form button for requesting more data. It worked really well and didn't even need to use JS.
2 comments

You can still do this. I wrote a chess game that checks arg 0 for "cgi" (otherwise it uses a VT interface) and renders a new board in the browser every time the other player makes a move. It works with absolutely no javascript.
Imagine trying to argue UI development was solved in the 90s and then telling me you use manual pagination as the follow up
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