Slashdot Mirror
IE7 To Support XMLHTTP Requests
Ruliz Galaxor writes "IEBlog posts that Internet Explorer 7 will support a native XMLHTTPRequest object as many other browsers currently do. This will mean no more ActiveX MSXML objects to implement AJAX functionality. It looks like Microsoft is seriously trying to make the lives of us web developers easier. Of course you'll still need to use the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX object if you want to support IE6 and older."
> XMLHTTPRequest is too important for MS not to try and control it. I wouldn't rule out a good ol' "embrace and extend" move.
What the hell are you talking about ? Microsoft invented the damn thing. Embrace and extend my ass...
FireFox doesn't even fully support CSS2. (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#text-shad ow-props) When will FireFox join the inevitable?
3
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1071
Note this bug was opened in 1999. Judging from the target milestone (mozilla1.9) and the FireFox roadmap, we will have full CSS2 support in FireFox 3.0 by 2007. Wow, eight years...
What IE really needs right now, if it wants to be taken seriously as a platform for AJAX web applications, is proper DOM/CSS support. The following would be a good start (my current peeve list with IE6):
I've posted this on ieblog before. I sincerely hope that somehow someone on the IE team sees one my numerous implementations of the above list of rants and implements solutions for them. It'll make the professional lives of many AJAX developers quite a bit more pleasant.
Firstly, this is not news. This was posted on the IEBlog way back in September.
Secondly, this is one hell of a misleading headline. Internet Explorer has supported this interface since Internet Explorer 5.0, released in the year 2000. All that's different in Internet Explorer 7 is that it's implemented as a native object, rather than with ActiveX.
Finally, this matters to practically nobody. Any decently-written code will work just fine in Internet Explorer 7 with no modification whatsoever. Even code written to use browser detection instead of feature/object detection, (a bad idea) will work just fine, assuming that the ActiveX interface sticks around too.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Microsoft invented XMLHttpRequest. Not Firefox, not opera, not KHTML. They all copied it from IE.
So it would be Firefox/Opera/KHTML that are doing the "embracing and extending" in this case.
On a side note, I don't see why this is a big deal. They are likely still going to use a COM object underneath. All this is is a coding shortcut, that no one will be able to use anyway because you're still going to have to support IE6 for the next 3 years at least.
> are already well advanced with implementations of SVG, DOM, CSS, PNG, JPEG2000 and XForms.
/>
/>
;-) I hadn't realized I needed to point out explicitly that I helped. But I'm not involved in selling implementations, only in using them.
Only Firefox/Mozilla has XForms; sadly Opera and Safari don't.
XForms, by the way, is the only stanrd to incorporate all the stuff that XMLTTHPRequest does, and it does so in a very easy way.
For example, if you want to load up your del.icio.us tags you just do this in the <head>:
<instance src="http://del.icio.us/api/tags/get"
Then you can list them like this in the HTML <body>:
<repeat nodeset="/tags/tag">
<output ref="."
</repeat>
using the XForms <submission> tag, you can also do asynchronous HTTP POST of XML, of any instance in the page, and direct the results to come back to any instance. When the instance comes back, the UI automatically recalculates itself, and any UI widgets or groups (i.e., entire <div>s) that were bound to non-existent nodes suddenly appear in the UI when the data updates and the nodes appear. You can even make submission happen automatically when fields are exited or when menu items are changed, so forms can be completely dynamic with absolutely no JavaScript; just plain markup.
As Rachel Ray says, "How cool is that?"
Lately I've been using FormFaces (an entire XForms implementation for IE, Safari, and FF/Mozilla in AJAX/JavaScript) and Chiba (a Tomcat-based back end that outputs either plain HTML with no JavaScript for no-brainer ADA compliance, or AJAX-enhanced HTML for dynamic forms). These implementations are running neck-and-neck with the Firefox/Mozilla native one, and are catching up to the very advanced IE plugin FormsPlayer.
If you want to see how to do the the dynamic XML features you get from HTTPXMLRequest but in a standards-compliant way and using simple markup, see XForms for HTML Authors.
P.S. Since I got bashed for not saying this before, I have to add that I was one of the editors of the XForms 1.0 recommendation. Since I post under my real name and list the info on my website (and at the top of the spec
There are several benefits to the XMLHttpRequest object over IFRAME. I won't go into all of them, but essentially XMLHttpRequest provides an object interface (with all of its due properties and methods) to help you as the developer manage the synchronization and transmission status at a lower level. On a related note, if one is running PHP, one can also user another alternative:
h ttprequest/
http://www.phpit.net/article/ajax-php-without-xml
Slower? Umm, no. Firefox is great for casual viewing, but when you doing research for a paper and have 10 to 20 tabs open. Its dog slow and uses 400 megs of ram which is insane. IE is faster than firefox, and opera is faster than IE and if you're on a mac, safari blows them all out of the water in sheer speed and memory usage.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I started using the iframe method back in 2001, and I've pretty much converted entirely over to xmlHttpRequest. The two main reasons:
1) IE makes a 'click' sound every time you navigate to a new url in a window or frame. using xmlHttpRequest gets rid of this.
2) Using xmlHttpRequest doesn't pollute your history, so it makes it a easier to make something useful happen when the user hits the back or forward button.
Generally speaking, compatibility isn't a problem- most of the time that I need to implement something using AJAX, any browser that doesn't support xmlHttpRequest will also not support some other feature that I am using anyway. The one exception here seems to be Opera browsers in the upper 7.x range, as IIRC Opera didn't get a usable xmlHttpRequest until 8.0. But personally, I'm not going to lose too much sleep over that.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?