Had I stalled progress on web development?

I had alway been involved in projects that requires the solution to run on a browser, mostly IE. Thus, most of my experiences and skillset and concentrated on making things work on a browser. From HTML to JavaScript to ASP to DLLs to JSP to Servlets to Struts, I had always performed my own research and development to ensure I would be skilled enough to make the most efficient use of the technologies employed. As far as I can remember, until last year, I had been racing with the evolution of web applications and would always adhere to the latest best practices. The final few things I remembered I was trying to adopt was tableless layout with CSS and AJAX. Few days ago, I was having dinner with a friend and we were dicussing about the current AJAX framework. I realised I no longer knew what's really happening the the AJAX world. I even joked with him that I am one of the AJAX pioneer as I implemented it in one of my previous projects about 1.5 years ago. It was just a plain XMLRequest call to refresh fields in a form without actually performing a form submit but it is still AJAX! Now, I can totally feel that I am no longer able to keep up with the latest in web development standards as I was not really involved in spear heading much development activities in the previous years. Hopefully, I had gained skillsets in other areas.