Simon Willison on xmlhttprequest

21 posts tagged “xmlhttprequest”

2012

How do you change page content and URL without reloading the whole page?

This can only be done using JavaScript. You use XMLHttpRequest to pull in new information from the server (also known as Ajax—most people use a JavaScript library such as jQuery to handle this) and then use the HTML5 history API, in particular the pushState method, to update the URL.

[... 133 words]

1:25 pm / 11th February 2012 / ajax, javascript, jquery, web-development, xmlhttprequest, quora

2009

flXHR. I was looking for something like this recently, glad to see it exists. flXHR is a drop-in replacement for regular XMLHttpRequest which uses an invisible Flash shim to allow cross-domain calls to be made, taking advantage of the Flash crossdomain.xml security model.

# 26th November 2009, 12:52 pm / ajax, crossdomain, flash, flxhr, javascript, swf, xhr, xmlhttprequest

rather baffling finding: POST requests, made via the XMLHTTP object, send header and body data in separate tcp/ip packets [and therefore,] xmlhttp GET performs better when sending small amounts of data than an xmlhttp POST

— Iain Lamb

# 18th August 2009, 12:27 pm / ajax, get, http, iainlamb, performance, post, xmlhttprequest

2008

Reading binary files using Ajax. There’s a simple trick for Firefox, and (amazingly) you can get IE to play along using a function written in VBScript.

# 22nd April 2008, 7:02 pm / ajax, binary, firefox, internet-explorer, javascript, vbscript, xmlhttprequest

Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest (via) “Firefox 3 implements the W3C Access Control working draft, which gives you the ability to do XMLHttpRequests to other web sites”—you can mark a document as available for cross-domain requests using either an Access-Control HTTP header or an XML processing instruction.

# 9th January 2008, 11:57 pm / accesscontrol, ajax, crossdomain, firefox, firefox3, http, javascript, john-resig, mozilla, w3c, xml, xmlhttprequest

2007

The Future of Comet: Part 1, Comet Today. Absolutely the best summary I’ve seen of all of the current Comet techniques in one place.

# 11th December 2007, 1:13 pm / ajax, comet, iframes, jacob-rus, javascript, long-polling, xmlhttprequest

Ten New Things in WebKit 3. Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet?

# 16th November 2007, 1:19 am / ajax, comet, javascript, safari, safari3, webkit, xmlhttprequest

Which is the real explanation of where the name XMLHTTP comes from- the thing is mostly about HTTP and doesn't have any specific tie to XML other than that was the easiest excuse for shipping it so I needed to cram XML into the name (plus- XML was the hot technology at the time and it seemed like some good marketing for the component).

— Alex Hopmann

# 24th January 2007, 8:48 pm / ajax, marketing, xml, xmlhttprequest

2006

XMLHttpRequests using an IFrame Proxy (via) Another scary hack abstracted away by Dojo.

# 1st August 2006, 5:40 pm / ajax, crossdomain, dojo, javascript, xmlhttprequest

The XMLHttpRequest Object (via) A W3C Working Draft.

# 9th April 2006, 11:58 pm / w3c, xmlhttprequest

2005

Understanding the Greasemonkey vulnerability

If you have any version of Greasemonkey installed prior to 0.3.5, which was released a few hours ago, or if you are running any of the 0.4 alphas, you need to go and upgrade right now. All versions of Greasemonkey aside from 0.3.5 contain a nasty security hole, which could enable malicious web sites to read any file from your hard drive without you knowing.

[... 809 words]

3:09 am / 20th July 2005 / greasemonkey, javascript, security, xmlhttprequest

Why the term Ajax is useful

Software design patterns are useful mainly because they provide a shared vocabulary: rather than discussing the intimate details of a three layered application architecture, we say “MVC”. Rather than describing an object that tracks your progress while looping over a collection, we say “Iterator”.

[... 152 words]

1:15 am / 19th April 2005 / ajax, design-patterns, jargon, xmlhttprequest

Combining XMLHttpRequest and Rails to Produce More Efficient UIs. Ruby on Rails is setting itself up to be THE framework for Ajax work.

# 10th March 2005, 8:10 pm / rails, xmlhttprequest

map.search.ch (via) Unbelievably slick XMLHttpRequest powered map interface.

# 5th January 2005, 5:59 pm / xmlhttprequest