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I remember DHTML before the word Ajax was coined. It is somewhat sad we didn't push this forward to its absolute limit. Instead 20 years later we have very different set of Front End tech.

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And XLST... Actually pretty cool, a standardized way to render XML files. Too bad XML was way too verbose and clunky that everyone basically walked away from it.

I had a flat file blog hobby project that would take ATOM documents and run them through XSLT to render the whole website, all on client side.

I built an entire window manager and trading platform around XSLT, streaming prices and trades using XHR. It never saw the light of day, thankfully.

Thankfully? It didn't work well or you weren't satisfied with the technology? Rendering too slow?

The furthest DHTML got was "here's a cool JavaScript you can add to your page to make it do this". I used to download these from DynamicDrive.com. It took Crockford and Ajax to birth front-end development as we know it today (albeit without modules, CSS 2, or ES5+).

It didn't help that so many JavaScript books of the time treated the language like a toy.

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