January 25, 2006

IE to Support Native XMLHttpRequest object?

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - IE to Support Native XMLHttpRequest object

To keep focused when checking email throughout the day, I only have one feed coming into my 'Web Clip' viewer in Gmail, that of planet.xmlhack.com. It's always a fun adventure to see who's behind the various post's that catch my interest enough to click, as this information is not provided via this interface. After reading this particular title, I was prepared to give whomever it was a little history lesson if the content turned out to be anything like what the title inferred -- that Yet Again Microsoft was late to the game on this one, but is succumbing to the pressures and ultimately 'giving in.'

Much to my surprise, it was Dare... someone who had no need for a history lesson of any type. In scanning through the post I was happy to see him tack the following to the end:

I wonder if anyone else sees the irony in Internet Explorer copying features from Firefox which were originally copied from IE?

Yep!

In fact, this sentence from Sunava's post:

> IE7’s implementation of the XMLHTTP object is consistent with that of other browsers, simplifying the task of cross-browser compatibility <

:seemed WAY TO APOLOGETIC!

Taking a snippet from from Jon Udell's PDC interview with Bill Gates [I've provided a larger chunk below to provide context]:

BG: Who did DHTML?

JU: You guys did. You guys did, I know that.

BG: Okay. And you know, it's there. Other browsers did the same thing, that was great.

No need to apologize, Sunava :) You folks led the pack for a good five years before before the rest of the browser world caught up (speaking to the XMLHTTP object specifically. DHTML (at least a good portion of it) has been supported since back in the days when they called Firefox "Netscape". Some of you may be to young to remember the way things were WAY BACK in the 20th century, but it's true story none-the-less. ;)

Still, its good to see that MS is exposing the functionality of the XMLHTTP object via a scripting interface, as this DEFINITELY helps bring the security of any given application WAY UP, while at the same time bringing a nice little present to the folks who haven't been able to take advantage of all that this control has to offer due to a "no ActiveX" policy.

Obviously, if you're going to go to the extent of creating a scripting interface, choosing to not-follow the implementation made first by Mozilla and then followed-up by Opera and Safari, would have been the wrong way to 'win friends'. But I think its safe to say that once the decision came down to provide this interface, deciding on how to implement it was pretty simple.

EXCELLENT NEWS! :)

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A bit more context from the above quote:

BG: Say again what you think the two parallel paths would be?

JU: So one would be... Well in the world of data, it would be, let's say XQuery, ECMAScript for XML, things which are standards, in the world of presentation, the future evolution of DHTML and CSS and things like that, as you're actually even using yourselves...well you have been for a long time, but you're using now in a new context with these gadgets on the desktop. So that's one style of doing things.

BG: Who did DHTML?

JU: You guys did. You guys did, I know that.

BG: Okay. And you know, it's there. Other browsers did the same thing, that was great. In terms of this Atlas runtime stuff, other browsers may well do the same thing. Actually, a lot of the Atlas stuff is even independent of that. So I'm not sure of the parallel path you're drawing. Certainly when you look at something like LINQ, there's always going to be these query type things that are outside of normal programming languages. And great, we'll support those things. But the complexity for a developer of having this funny query utterance which is separate from their functions and their logic, that's never going to be as simple as being able to have the set-type operators right in the language itself. And so the two will co-exist. If somebody wants to have that big XSLT thing or XQuery thing inside their source code or just a reference off to another file that has that, great. We support that. The brilliant thing is giving you a choice of having that right there in the logic in a way that's readable. That's the breakthrough, is that the impedance between -- okay, here's my data mapping logic and here's my business logic. Those two things can be in a readable piece of code.