Way back in the history-times, in August of the year 2000, I authored an article detailing a technique that allowed for bi-directional communication between a server and a web browser without a page refresh. The technique was, if I do say so myself, pretty clever in a primitive, kludgy, clunky kind of way. I have no idea if I was really the “first” to come up with this but I do know that the rise of standardized AJAX a few short years later completely and deservedly eclipsed it.
What I’ve recently realized is that a lot of traffic still points to that article. I, in fact, get nearly as many 404 errors for people looking for this article as I do legitimate hits to the site (“popular” I am not). It’s listed in the Wikipedia article on Remote Scripting and in many blogs, forums and resource sites. For the curious various versions of it are available on the Internet Archive.
Now it’s nothing more than a weird little historical artifact that I’ll keep here on the digital mantle for posterity.
