Way ahead of the curve

What amuses me most about this Ajax craze is that I wrote this in autumn of 1998. “Ajax” was around long before XMLHttpRequest… the script talks to the server by way of reloading an invisible frame which pulls in a fresh copy of a Javascript array. (It looks as if it reloads on other actions because in order to circumvent the then problematic divide between multiple non-standard DOMs, it regenerates the entire HTML for the main frame on the fly whenever you click something. The page generation is entirely client-side, though.) Six years later, at a time I have completely forgotten about this piece of work, Google debuts Google Maps which uses the exact same trick…

Which goes to show: nothing is new.

(In case you wonder about the, uh, “colourful” names: it was meant for an online gaming ladder site. It was never actually used anywhere.)

Referenced in Reminiscing.