[pzuraq]

I actually have a friend who wrote in Dojo, so was aware of its existence, but had no idea it was so influential/early in the First Frameworks era. Same with GWT/Closure, as has been mentioned by others. I did run this article by some mentors who have been in the industry since the 90s before posting, as I wanted to make sure I didn't gloss over it entirely, but unfortunately it seems they didn't experience those either.

And I think that's the core of the issue, even people who were around at that time do not remember all of these things. Ultimately, even those of us who are trying our best are going to miss details, and this is only going to get worse as we get further and further away from the beginning. Honestly it seems like this is a job for historians, and unfortunately I am not one, just a dev trying to share my thoughts and experience

> and the error of suggesting XHR came later

According to Wikipedia, XHR was introduced in 1999, 4 years after JS was introduced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

[genezeta]

> According to Wikipedia, XHR was introduced in 1999, 4 years after JS was introduced

Your way of commenting on XHR in this paragraph...

    In this environment, it’s understandable that JS was generally seen as a toy language and not something you’d write a full app in. The most common thing you would do was include jQuery, throw together some scripts for a few UI widgets, and call it a day. As time went on and XHR was introduced and popularized, people started to put parts of their UI flow into a single page, especially for complex flows that required multiple back and forth interactions between the client and the server, but the majority of the app stayed firmly on the server.

...where you are talking about jQuery already being a common thing, which implies at the very least 2006 but more likely 2008-9, and then writing "As time went on and XHR was introduced and popularized", suggests the idea that XHR somehow was introduced much later, when jQuery was already common.

This is what I was referring to. It may have not been intentional, but the way you comment and present it suggests a mistaken timeline.

[pzuraq]

That's a good point, definitely not what I meant there. I think in my first draft I actually just said "JavaScript widgets" and when I updated it to jQuery I didn't update the rest of the paragraph. Thanks for pointing that out!