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.
