This is an old article (aug 1999), but it's still pretty good. http://www.asktog.com/columns/028WebStealers.html "JavaScript, the ultimate hack In desperation, the good folks at Netscape threw together JavaScript, a patch necessary to keep the fledgling company and their thousands of drowning developers alive. What the engineers failed to realize was that only programmers like themselves were being thrown a life preserver; while the majority of their site developers slowly drowned."
