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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."
"Of course you'll still need to use the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX object if you want to support IE6 and older."
Which means that browser type checking will need to remain pretty much for the forseable future. Inclusion of XMLHTTPRequest now is nice, but in practical terms its perfectly meaningless.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Begun the browser war has (again).
It looks like Microsoft is seriously trying to make the lives of us web developers easier.
MS deserves credit for this sensible implementation of XMLHTTPRequest, and indeed for innovating XMLHTTPRequest in the first place.
Now if MS is "seriously trying to make the lives of us web developers easier" [when] will they implement the rest of the core W3C web standards?
FF, Opera and Safari and their respective communities are already well advanced with implementations of SVG, DOM, CSS, PNG, JPEG2000 and XForms. These standards are bread and butter for "seriously trying to make the lives of us web developers easier".
When will MS join the inevitable?
It's nice that MS is making this change but I'm more curious about whether their web applications will work without MSIE specific technologies. Example: Outlook Web Access isn't feature full on non-IE browsers. Also live.com and the new hotmail interface are still limited. Project Web Access is another one. Until these applications work without IE it won't be possible for a lot of businesses to move away from IE.
Seriously. IFrame support has been around for quite some time and works well in most major browsers. You just hide the iframe and communicate to the server through it. I've done this lots of times, long before AJAX was around. It even worked in IE 4 and NS 4.7x if I remember right.
Sure, its not as elegant as using XMLHTTPRequest, but when is cross-browser javascript ever elegant? Is it better to have a hidden iframe on your page, or several lines of IE-specific code and dependence on an ActiveX control?
That's just my 2 clams. I've only just started working with XMLHTTPRequest, so I might be missing something. Please enlighten me if there is some major advantage that I'm not seeing.
Hell is other people's code.
Isn't that a bit unfair considering that the feature in question first appeared in IE? They're just making it simpler to access. I'm not sure you can accuse them of 'embracing' something they came up with in the first place. It's a bit like saying that with Vista they're going to 'embrace and extend' the NTFS file system format.
As I understand it, anyway. I've probably got something wrong though.
Sure, there's a reason: the "loading" visuals on the browser. Especially if you're making lots of calls, having that progress bar and the wait cursor are confusing to the user and kind of annoying. Same goes for using script elements.
And lack of support for this property has exactly how much of a side effect? Surely you can do better than that.
This is just eye candy, IE6's flaws are deep and pervasive. If IE7 can fix some of these that'll be a big step forward.
Mozilla's most important CSS2 shortfall is support for inline-block, but as with other properties, no support is better than buggy support.
Complaining that Firefox doesn't support a couple minor CSS2 features is like saying "You can still die in a car with crumple zones and air bags, so you may as well drive a 1972 Ford Pinto".
And IE6 doesn't fully support CSS1. I imagine there are few browsers that fully support any web compliance. Just sayin
"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."
If you RTFA you'll see the benefit is for those organisations that have ActiveX turned off for security reasons (lots of em).
On the IEBlog you have a code snippet showing how you create the native XMLHttpRequest object for Opera, FF and IE7, while fall back to ActiveX for IE6 and earlier.
So there IS benefit. And no, it's not a simple scripting shortcut at all.
What makes more sense?
Which do you think is the healthy, competitive scenario? Which do you think hands control of the future of the web over to a single organisation?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Reference4 0730/#text-shadow
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-CSS-TECHS-200
My point was that FireFox/Gecko is not the paragon of standards compliance, so dragging IE into the "you don't comply" mud is hypocritical. Indeed there are more important things to make work, but nevertheless, compliance is incomplete.
To that effect, since CSS2 came out in 1998, and CSS2.1 in 2005, I would have expected text-shadow (along with the other things you listed) to get fixed in that time frame. What have the FireFox devs been doing?