It's also a change in mindset in the 'developer community'. Up until let's say 5 years ago, Javascript was considered plain dirty. Javascript was a non-portable hack that was only to be touched in the most extreme circumstances. Websites that didn't work on Lynx were reviled. Oh how things have changed, and yet have stayed the same at that same time (i.e., your 'welcome to 1990' comment).

On a related note, the last couple of weeks I've been working on rewriting an old (2000-era) web app, originally written in Visual Interdev. Visual Interdev was widely derided back then, it was something only Visual Basic 'programmers' (the chaff of the programming community) would touch. Turns out that many things it did are a lot more popular nowadays - client side calculations, validation, dynamically updating the UI, etc. Of course there was no XMLHttpRequest, so by modern standards it was quite limited; still, it's funny how something so derided back then just turned out to be ahead of its time.