Re: 25 years ago
25 years ago you couldn’t write a document in a browser, have it auto save without human interaction, and have multiple collaborators.
Well, you could have, actually. HotJava was released 25 years ago, and it would have been entirely possible to implement this set of features in an applet.
For that matter, LiveScript was released 26 years ago, and while there was no XHR or WebSockets for background interaction with the server, it would have been possible to, for example, count keystrokes and do a foreground POST when a threshold was reached. The UX might have been a bit clunky - but then that's still true for most of the (horrible) web SPAs I deal with.
Of course, a better question is whether turning browsers into the dumb terminals of the 21st century is a good thing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
