After Charlie Owens talk at Webclerks yesterday about the “good old days” I remembered how we did Ajax before XMLHttpRequest:

In the late 90s or very early 20s I had multiple select boxes and the options in the second select depended on the selection in the first select. When the user changed the option in the first select box, we would load an iframe which rendered the second select box and copy it with JavaScript from the iframe to the parent. The JavaScript that did the copying was of course an inline script inside the iframe.

That’s what I call a hack.