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A comment on Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995). Parent comment

Re:Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995) by ahlschwede on Friday December 04, 2020 @11:00AM (#25303770)
Before Ajax one way to do Web 2.0 style interactions was to hide a Java applet in an invisible iFrame and feed data back and forth from the page using JavaScript.

I think people forget that the early web had a proliferation of plug-ins. JavaScript was most often used as glue between HTML and plug-ins which had fewer platform incompatibilities than the browsers. One of the reasons Flash became the dominant plug-in was because it was universal enough to duplicate the features of other plug-ins, including asynchronous communication via Java applet.

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Re:Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995) by moron4hire on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:57PM (#25309450)
IFrames were invented later (and initially, only in IE). You also didn't ever need to put the applet in a separate frame. You could just put the applet on the page. Indeed, putting it in a frame would have defeated the purpose, because there was no way to communicate across frames at the time.
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