You had to use JavaScript or VBScript but all the safety rails are off, this is pre-sand boxing, what do you mean websites might be malicious why would someone make one like that... you could do crazy things, and fully leverage windows APIs directly without much effort via VBScript, I once used the winforms(?) APIs to introspect field labels and names to automate the driving of multiple desktop apps from a crazy jquery and VBScript monstrosity. Made me twice as efficient at that job though so it was awesome.
You could control child iframes and pop up windows (remember these?) and VBScript let you shoehorn quite a bit of native UI type stuff whenever it was going to be easier than building something with simple forms, JavaScript, tables and frames. If you got really fancy you would Base64 some absurd binary into your app and unpack it on the fly with VBScript then call it from a temp directory in order to drive things like interacting with network services that didn’t have any sort of thing you could work with via HTML JavaScript and XMlHTTRequest (this was the very dawn of Ajax)
You had to use JavaScript or VBScript but all the safety rails are off, this is pre-sand boxing, what do you mean websites might be malicious why would someone make one like that... you could do crazy things, and fully leverage windows APIs directly without much effort via VBScript, I once used the winforms(?) APIs to introspect field labels and names to automate the driving of multiple desktop apps from a crazy jquery and VBScript monstrosity. Made me twice as efficient at that job though so it was awesome.
You could control child iframes and pop up windows (remember these?) and VBScript let you shoehorn quite a bit of native UI type stuff whenever it was going to be easier than building something with simple forms, JavaScript, tables and frames. If you got really fancy you would Base64 some absurd binary into your app and unpack it on the fly with VBScript then call it from a temp directory in order to drive things like interacting with network services that didn’t have any sort of thing you could work with via HTML JavaScript and XMlHTTRequest (this was the very dawn of Ajax)