The pure web without all the bells and whistles :)
Then Netscape developed javascript (first Mocha/LiveScript) and here we are now.
"cobbled together" would probably be a better choice of words.
Indeed. It made me remember of one of my first programming projects: a teacher of mine had written a spaceship game for Netscape and I ported it to IE's UI model. There was no standardized DOM and, IIRC, forcing non-compatibility was one of the pillars of Microsoft's strategy.