It was not well liked.
The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation.
Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.
The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation.
Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.
I don't know exactly when the tides turned on this attitude. In 2000 the above were not controversial opinions. By 2010 it was gone, and I saw people call it crazy talk, but it probably happened earlier than that. Probably things like gmail in 2004 were a turning point.
I still feel like this.
I dunno, there are some pretty egregious examples of this being false though. gmail is one such example. I remember using webmail in the days where every action was a full page load -- and we had slower connections then too, which made it hurt even more. Then gmail came out and blew everybody away with its response times. A well thought out AJAX solution could give you minimal load times for data. The issue lately is when the JS code is too big, not well tuned, and gives the equivalent of several 90s-era-website-full-pageloads worth of data with every action. That is to say a lot of websites aren't as lean as they could be.
I'm not a web focused person so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, this is my outsider's perspective.
GWT was essentially what typescript is today but java and it handled most of the nasty DOM related stuff and browser incompatibilities.
If they were done in javascript, the code was heavily cargo-culted and cut and paste.