XMLHttpRequest POST request on Gecko

[Zbigniew Koziol]

On Wednesday 25 October 2006 13:48, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 12:26:05PM -0400, Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> > Opera for a long tme missed proper support for *XMLHttpRequest . I would
> > believe it is working now properly with gmail. In general, Opera is  nice
> > browser and they care a lot there to have it close to well established
> > standards.
>
> As far as I can tell, even with opera 9.02 gmail is still running in
> standard html mode rather than the javascript method used by ie and
> firefox and a few others.  The javascript interface is much faster and
> has a lot less overhead of course.  Now perhaps the problem is that they 
> recognize opera and don't check the version before deciding which method
> to use for it.  

Or perhaps they do not care so much about Opera, which is potentially a 
competitor to Firefox?

> Of course opera is always very big on standards, and 
> tend to avoid non standard features, such as the xmlhttprequest that
> someone invented but isn't part of the html standards.

I have no much problem with the fact that something innovative that is not 
standardized yet is used. HTML around 15 years ago has not been 
standardized ;)

XMLHttpRequest is responsible for a breakthrough in web technologies that 
occurs just right now. It will cause an explosion of web applications 
available around. It is been standardized already, W3C works on that. It is 
still technology which is not well known even by web developers. I started my 
work on developing a complex web application about 6 months ago and my first 
idea was to use frames, with a hidden frame communicating with the server by 
HTTP while with other frames by JavaScript. JavaScript would also push the 
hidden frame to receive data from the server. Not a very elegant but quite 
effective solution. After a month or so I realized that Ajax is available 
around ... 

Digression: would Ajax spread out so fast if there were software patents? And 
that idea, though it is not super-duper original, might had been patented...

And an idea: I would believe that the future, possibly not so distant, will 
bring even a something more clever and powerful: communicating by JavaScript 
with remote databases directely, without the need to connect to HTTP server 
between. Not easy to do? Security concerns? Not so much really. The only 
condition is that an application is really well thought and access to Stored 
Procedures only is available there. In that way one does not need to worry so 
much about hiding passwords. Actually, session ID could take the role of 
access password to database.

zb.

> Len Sorensen
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