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Microsoft solved this with VIEWSTATE in ASP.NET it's perfect, then industry went with everything Ajax and other over engineered frameworks.

You don't know how much easier it was at that time (at least for web developers with little prior ASP experience) to:

- write a simple web service in C# on top of ASP.NET MVC v1

- build a web frontend on top of it using Prototype.js (or jQuery) and a library of components like ExtJS