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IE7 To Support XMLHTTP Requests

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the new-tricks-for-an-old-dog dept.

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."

6 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I dunno.... by Chokolad · · Score: 5, Informative

    > 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...

  2. oh let's not talk standards by ashpool7 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10713

    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...

    1. Re:oh let's not talk standards by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Informative

      Bad example. Text-shadow was deprecated in CSS 2.1 which fully supercedes CSS 2.0. Better examples are that Firefox doesn't support:
        * display: compact and inline-block
        * content: counters and quotes (recent version has quotes)
        * min/max-width/heigth (recent versions support it very limited)

      There are a couple more. These are also the primary reasons Firefox cannot easily pass Acid2.

  3. What Internet Explorer 7 *REALLY* needs... by TodLiebeck · · Score: 5, Informative

    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):

    • Implement document.importNode()
    • Support setting of opposite side CSS positioning properties at the same time, i.e., setting "left" and "right or "top" and "bottom" properties on same element.
    • Fix this problem: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;177378 Documenting a design flaw does not make it any less of a design flaw.
    • Fix other problems with SELECT element, e.g., the fact that it is not possible to add a ListBox-style select to a document using DOM manipulation.
    • Fix bug where the presence of a vertical scrollbar adjacent to a 100% wide table inside of a CSS positioned element results in a horizontal scrollbar due to incorrect width calculations.
    • Fix issue where 100% wide textareas expand to be a bit wider (creating a horizontal scrollbar) once text is entered. This also only occurs if the text area resides in a CSS positioned DIV.
    • Correctly monitor the DOM for updates and repaint appropriately. Currently there are cases where IE will not repaint the screen even though the DOM has changed, requiring the developer to perform additional DOM manipulations just to trigger a repaint.
    • Fix this completely insane bug (scroll down to a few paragraphs or search for the text "worst bug ever in Internet Explorer 6."
    • And last but definitely not least, simply bring the performance up to a level relative to Firefox/Opera/Konqueror/Safari, especially when dealing with reasonably complex and interactive DOMs.

    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.

  4. Not news by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  5. Except that.... by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.