[Secretmapper]

Javascript, for the longest time, was a _slow_ moving target - web browsers themselves had cross browser issues where API X might work on browser A but not on browser B.

There were so many bigger issues like that I think that made this not a high priority in the grand scheme of things.

I think a good example of this is jQuery - while jQuery is a good tool, a huge part of its usage was the quirks between browsers. Selectors and the class of problems jQuery solved had more immediate impact to web applications, so fixing and taking from it became a more immediate concern.

JS API -> moment/date-fn/luxon -> Temporal has the same kind of trajectory. Not that those libraries will now be immediately 'bad' mind you - just that the base API is more sane.

[phire]

And for the longest time, nobody even considered javascript to be a serious tool; It was rare for anyone to write more than a hundred lines of javascript.

I remember when google introduced gmail in 2004. Suddenly google had done full single-page application in javascript, proving that not only was it possible, but that the resulting user-experience was awesome.

At the time, there were no javascript frameworks. Jquery (if you can even call it a framework) wasn't created until 2006. I don't think there were even helper libraries.

I mostly remember javascript from dynamicdrive.com, where you would go to find quick snippets of "Dynamic HTML" to copy/paste into your html. Sometimes there were useful things like roll-over menus, but I remember many of them being silly toys, like sparkles that would follow your mouse around the screen, or snow which would slowly cover the page.

[agos]

excellent point. it took 6 years (!) for Backbone.js, arguably the first Javascript framework, to come out... and the same year AngularJS.