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Even the AJAX technology was initially sold as "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". Today, it's most common to send AJAX requests from frontends and most of them

by pyeri 3y ago

Even the AJAX technology was initially sold as "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". Today, it's most common to send AJAX requests from frontends and most of them have nothing to do with XML data, but funny how that acronym still stays till today!

deaddodo 3y ago
The original XMLHttpRequest introduced in Microsoft's IE was intended to transport XML messages from a backend to a frontend, since JSON didn't exist at the time. Realistically, originally it was just used to directly inject blobs of html into the page. Ajax just referred to utilizing that feature along with JavaScript's async functionality to create dynamic webpages. It wasn't really a technology, and I've very rarely heard the term post-2010 (same as how "DHTML" died around 2005).
- dheera 3y ago
  I had the equivalent of XMLHttpRequest LONG before XMLHttpRequest existed, back in the IE4 days. I did it by creating a tiny iframe with the target URL and then retrieving its contents. Never mind that I could also read users' hard drives, but I had AJAX long before AJAX was launched. Unfortunately there was a period of time when Microsoft patched the security issues with iframes and that was no longer possible, but it was fun for a while to have a taste of the future.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    I product I developed in the early 2000's used that technique for a dynamic tree control. That product wasn't retired until 3-4 years ago. It still worked as intended in modern browsers but you could, in theory, fire up Netscape 4.0 in 2019 and that dynamic tree would still work.
  - wizofaus 3y ago
    iframes didn't become common across browsers much earlier than XMLHttpRequest from what I recall - maybe a year or so? But I certainly remember playing similar tricks to get smoother page updates, in some cases even using actual FRAME elements (are there any pages at all these days still using those? They appear to be deprecated anyway.)

by pyeri 3y ago

deaddodo 3y ago

The original XMLHttpRequest introduced in Microsoft's IE was intended to transport XML messages from a backend to a frontend, since JSON didn't exist at the time. Realistically, originally it was just used to directly inject blobs of html into the page. Ajax just referred to utilizing that feature along with JavaScript's async functionality to create dynamic webpages. It wasn't really a technology, and I've very rarely heard the term post-2010 (same as how "DHTML" died around 2005).

dheera 3y ago
I had the equivalent of XMLHttpRequest LONG before XMLHttpRequest existed, back in the IE4 days. I did it by creating a tiny iframe with the target URL and then retrieving its contents. Never mind that I could also read users' hard drives, but I had AJAX long before AJAX was launched. Unfortunately there was a period of time when Microsoft patched the security issues with iframes and that was no longer possible, but it was fun for a while to have a taste of the future.
- wvenable 3y ago
  I product I developed in the early 2000's used that technique for a dynamic tree control. That product wasn't retired until 3-4 years ago. It still worked as intended in modern browsers but you could, in theory, fire up Netscape 4.0 in 2019 and that dynamic tree would still work.
- wizofaus 3y ago
  iframes didn't become common across browsers much earlier than XMLHttpRequest from what I recall - maybe a year or so? But I certainly remember playing similar tricks to get smoother page updates, in some cases even using actual FRAME elements (are there any pages at all these days still using those? They appear to be deprecated anyway.)