XHR made more things possible but before that had JavaScript made what was then called DHTML possible. You could do things like swap images and shift positions, etc. to prepare a form to post since that kind of application isn’t dependent on bidirectional communication, latency, or a huge problem space.
Back around 1998 we built a custom product selector for a popular knife manufacturer which basically did that: you had choices for three components – base, blade, and handle — and a couple other options, but unlike something like Google Maps the list of possible images to load and all of their metadata easily fit in memory and they didn’t take terribly long to download so you could have a nice interactive visual display which was basically a form with a few selects and checkboxes.
The article was written in 1994. DHTML didn't exist. I'm pretty familiar with the state of the state in '94. The web was a pretty limited platform. Also, don't forget, still mostly dialup. Additional web requests were expensive, user experience wise. This was the AOL heyday.
I’m aware of that: I was specifically responding to the XHR reference, since the “maze of possible pages” part had been avoidable for years before IE5 introduced XHR.
Similarly, yes, we used dialup back then but we also were using small images with much less color depth and people were more accustomed to pages taking longer to load. Some optimized images could easily have made a basic pizza designer possible in that era - probably with cartoonish 16-color GIF graphics but a good designer could do a surprising amount with a little creativity.
Back around 1998 we built a custom product selector for a popular knife manufacturer which basically did that: you had choices for three components – base, blade, and handle — and a couple other options, but unlike something like Google Maps the list of possible images to load and all of their metadata easily fit in memory and they didn’t take terribly long to download so you could have a nice interactive visual display which was basically a form with a few selects and checkboxes.