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Proof of Concept For Ajax Without JavaScript

Posted by timothy on from the now-make-a-good-acronym-for-comet dept.

JonathansCorner.com writes "Even if Ajax was backronymed to 'Asynchronous JavaScript and XML,' it works with JSON substituted for XML. Here's a proof of concept that JavaScript/VBScript are not strictly necessary either. The technique, besides being used standalone, may be useful to provide a better 'graceful degradation' for Ajax applications used by clients with scripting turned off."

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Re:iFrame? by uglyduckling · · Score: 5, Informative

    No. It's someone who has stuck an iFrame in their page and written a python script to return different html for the iFrame depending on what you click. It's 1998 technology 'dynamic' pages. Nothing to see here...

  2. Nothing to see here, etc by hkz · · Score: 3, Informative

    So you post a form to an iframe by pressing a submit button, and the iframe reloads with new dynamic content? And this is somehow AJAX? The whole interesting thing with AJAX is that you can interact with the web server while staying on the same page. You can type something into a search box, say, and the webserver sends you back some matching words in real time. Sure you could mimic the same thing with a POST and a results page, but that is exactly the paradigm that AJAX was supposed to replace.

  3. Re:How is this new? by uglyduckling · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not new. I got to the article before it was slashdotted. The author (who is also the author of the story) created a python script that spits out different inline CSS depending on the button you select to style some text, loading it into an iframe, in other words the sort of messy 'dynamic' pages that many sites used before being replaced by AJAX.

  4. Re:How is this new? by VTI9600 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Me too. The framework I used was JSRS. IIRC, it worked by creating hidden iframes on the fly for server-side communication and had dispatchers for PHP, ASP, perl and others. I don't recall if it was asynchronous or not, but pretty much anything can be made asynchronous in javascript by using the setInterval or setTimeout functions. The only thing I could tell was different was the fact that AJAX used the XMLHttpRequest object.

    So, naturally I was dumbfounded when people started talking about how amazing and cool AJAX was. I thought, "Hasn't this been around for years?"