You are probably correct. I don't know if it's true, it's probably more likely it was a way for it not to fail.

I said HTTP mainly because HTML is plaintext because of it. 1.0s main purpose was to manipulate the page. Of course Array objects weren't added til 1.1, when netscape navigator 3.0 released, but it was still mostly 1.0 code. I felt like having everything be coercable to string made it easy for you to just assign it to the document. If you assigned the wrong thing it wouldn't crash.

I originally thought there was a precursor to microsofts XMLHTTP in an earlier version due to the 1997 ECMAScript documentation specifically talking about using it both client and serverside to distribute computations, but it was far more static. So, I'm probably just wrong.