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Comment by danybittel | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, but IE4 was the first browser you could do, what we would now call "web apps". It had a stable javascript implementation and css, which let you create and edit elements dynamically. It really paved the way of how we do things today.

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and IE5 introduced dynamic web requests (originally ActiveXObject, then as the familiar XHR) which was way better than holding open a long page response

There was also a way of doing it with the DOM that Mozilla implemented. I don’t recall the specifics, it was something like you would instantiate a new Document object and then call open() on it with a URL. It ended up being abandoned when XMLHttpRequest was made the standard by WHATWG I think.

It was also possible in earlier browsers by using hidden frames. User interaction or a timer would trigger, then you load the frame (which contained dynamically generated js) and then call the javascript you'd just loaded.

XMLHttpRequest long predates the foundation of WHATWG. XMLHttpRequest was introduced with IE5 in 2001. WHATWG wasn't founded until 2004, when its first mailing list started.

If you check my comment again, I’m saying it was abandoned after WHATWG formalised XHR. It existed a long time before that. I think XHR was a little earlier, but they were roughly contemporaneous. And of course, people were doing XHR stuff before XHR existed with things like invisible iframes, but those were just hacks.

> It ended up being abandoned when XMLHttpRequest was made the standard by WHATWG I think.

"It" was using the Document object to load a URL. WHATWG was not responsible for standardizing XMLHTTPRequest.

https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#specification-history

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