however, a page that updated the Books selection dropdown after the user had chosen a different Author counted as being dynamic, as the page was changing itself.

maybe instead of removing the “dynamic” property of the current any-server-interaction-means-a-post pages, we could instead include another adjective for the ajaxian style pages, that encompasses that the page is more than dynamic, it is positively racing. taking your non-sticky retronym (my first encounter with that word by the way!) we could call ajax style pages as “fluid.” this conjures up images of ever changing html, which is pretty much exactly what’s happening.

and my favourite of your labels? i’d have to be a bit cantankerous today and go for the usable website. mostly because i can forsee a lot of broken sites that just don’t work due to flaws in an implementation of an ajax inspired approach. after all, not much can go wrong with a bit of plain html, the current dynamic sites have more potential for troubles, so it is easy to expect that the next level of complication will introduce a whole raft of unusable sites. but then again, as with the early pioneers of dynamic html, it will likely also produce a few brilliant diamonds that make everyone wish they could do just a good job.