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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

It is good to remember that that JavaScript is not the JavaScript of today even if the programming languge is the same (taking away the evolution).

For years JavaScript was only used for very small stuff like changing the color of a button in a mouse over.

The inflection point began lately with the inclusion of XMLHttpRequest [1] which enabled to have web apps instead of static pages with basic transaction forms. Then obviously another inflection point was NodeJS (and Google Chrome launch with the V8 engine).

My point is that the launch of JavaScript in 1985 is independent from it success later.

Beyond this, my personal opinion is that launching a VM specification would be better than announcing a specific programming language. WebAssembly comes very late to the game.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

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Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that V8 itself is the second inflection point?

NodeJS (which is just the V8 engine plus a server-side runtime environment) seems to owe a lot of its success to Google creating an actual fast, JIT-compiling JavaScript implementation in the form of V8.

In fact, the entire Cambrian explosion of new Javascript frameworks in the 2010s probably would not have taken place without V8 enabling them to run with acceptable performance.

I said exactly that above.

The inflection point was later. Significant client-side logic in javascript was not a thing until gmail and google maps showed the way in 2004/2005. Even then it wasn’t until jquery in 2006 that the ball really started rolling. The browser could do it in 2001, but it took half a decade for web development to catch up.

What can today’s browsers do that web development hasn’t caught up to?

I agree. GMail and Google Maps showed a complete different web but XMLHttpRequest was needed for that and was a milestone even if there was no web app to show at that time.

We should also take into account that Flash [1] was the technology that ate the limitations of the web. Flash was really powerful. More in a moment with low bandwidths around the world. For example this late 90 animation would be impossible to stream [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

[2] http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html (SWF files) available for streaming in YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zeek+locomotion

> even if there was no web app to show at that time

Wasn't OWA ("Outlook Web Access") the web app that XMLHttpRequest was made for?

> What can today’s browsers do that web development hasn’t caught up to?

With WebGPU, WASM, WebXR, WebBluetooth, WebUSB, WebTransport and more already/soon enabled, I'm fairly sure we're just scratching the surface currently on what use cases can be built with today web technologies.

Also, things outside browsers are changing enough that the use cases also expand. Bandwidth, latency, availability and more are also improving, enabling fancy stuff we couldn't dream about some years ago. The other day one of the HN submissions loaded a multi-GB file for client-side evaluation of a Stable Diffusion model, as just one example.

100%. Now those technologies offer an independent platform way of having a new kind of "OS".

ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") was important but it was introduced with IE 5 in 2001 and it was a few years before it was available everywhere. DHTML (D for Dynamic) started in 1997 or so with IE 4. XmLHtTpReQuEsT wasn't entirely novel -- people were using iframe tricks to make server requests. iframe hackery continued for a few years afterwards since xmlHTTPrequest support was still iffy.

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