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IE 5.5 had a lot of this with behaviors. IE 6 built on it further. Firefox push a lot of similar concepts with XUL. These ideas aren't especially new. There are a lot of subtlties that make this stuf really tricky.

For details on behaviors see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531079(v=vs.85).as....

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Yup. This is heavily inspired by DHTML behaviors, like most of the componenty stuff today on the Web.

IE team did some great trailblazing work back in the day! :)

Totally agree. I had so much fun playing with that stuff way back when. Sad it never (or took so long to?) caught on.

Performance improvements in modern browsers (V8 and webkit) along with more memory and faster processors are the game changers here.

Keep in mind that at the time it was all based on the Trident rendering engine introduced in IE4. The system requirements at the time were Win95 and 16MB of RAM. You write different code for that vs. a modern desktop today.

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