I’ve spent a lot of time over the years playing with different methods of having a web page get data from the server without refreshing the page. One of my major criteria has been to find a method that works across all browsers. A few different methods have cropped up over time, following an evolutionary path.<\/p>\n
In 1998, I used Microsoft Remote Scripting<\/a>, which used a Java applet for its transport layer. Java later became a problem, since it’s blocked by firewalls and no longer automatically supported by all of the main browsers.<\/p>\n In 1999 I started experimenting with frames, then a hidden Iframe, which I used in my JSRS<\/a> library in 2000. Iframes have become deprecated <\/a>as of the XHTML specification, and browser history<\/a> can be affected by their use, making this workable but suboptimal.<\/p>\n In 2000 I wrote RSLite<\/a> which uses a client-side image object and a cookie. This works across pretty well all browsers but has limited value due to url and cookie length limits.<\/p>\n I started to use and promote Microsoft’s XMLHttp<\/a> object fairly early on<\/a>, but its limitation to IE and at that time only beta Mozilla made it not-ready-for-primetime. It has since come into its own in the form of Ajax<\/a>, however there are still cross-domain scripting<\/a> limitations, which are an impediment to the kind of Web 2.0 mashups<\/a> that are some of the most compelling new uses of browser technology.<\/p>\n Danne Lundqvist<\/a> was amongst the first to talk about<\/a> the idea of using dynamically-generated script tags to send and receive data. In conjunction with Douglas Crockford<\/a>‘s JSON JavaScript Object Notation<\/a>, this method has recently been promoted by Yahoo in their Javascript Developer Center<\/a> as a way to perform cross-domain data transmission.<\/p>\n Full coverage of the method can be seen on Dan Theurer<\/a>‘s blog.<\/p>\n