GitHub’s API-driven automations didn’t appear out of nowhere. In 1995–1998, browser scripting, CGI endpoints, and HTML forms quietly established the practical patterns—requests, payloads, authentication, polling, and event notifications—that modern developer workflows now take for granted.
RSS (late 1990s) and Atom (later) are often remembered as “blogging features,” but their real legacy is API-shaped: a stable URL that returns structured, machine-readable updates. This chapter traces how 1995–1998 browser scripting, CGI, and form-driven web apps created the practical and cultural prerequisites for syndication APIs.
Before XMLHttpRequest and the term AJAX existed, developers in 1995–1998 used browser scripting, CGI, forms, and clever page-integration tricks to simulate “dynamic” web apps. This chapter shows the web APIs and constraints that made XHR feel inevitable.
From CGI scripts and HTML forms to early browser scripting, 1995–1998 created the need for structured, portable data—setting the stage for XML in web API history.
XML wasn’t yet a web standard in 1990–1994, but the early Web’s HTTP interfaces, CGI scripts, and MIME content types created the exact need XML later filled: predictable, self-describing data that could move cleanly between systems.