How is XMLHttpRequest support in Mozilla these days? It has worked on IE for a long time already, but I encountered a bug on Mozilla around 6-8 months ago. It may be fixed by now.
AJAX, asynchronous javascript... etc... are just unnecessarily fancy buzzwords for one simple, yet important and hitherto missing capability in Javascript:
The ability to store the results of an HTTP request in a string.
That's it. This ability actually has nothing directly to do with XML and yet the function to is called XMLHttpRequest. That HTTP request need not return XML for XMLHttpRequest to handle it properly. Go figure...
Amazing how someone can take something such a simple and fundamental capability and turn it into a whole blasted seminar:
http://adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php
[ Otoh, new issues and opportunities do arise because of this so-called 'asynchronous model'. They are mostly related to coming up with event-driven logic to respond to when XmlHttpRequests have completed. In a sense, your Javascript apps become 'multi-threaded' with all that implies. ]
I had wanted this ability for the longest time because I hated page reloads and in fact, discovered a way to get equivalent functionality on browsers that do not support XMLHttpRequest.
It relies on IFRAMES and a bit of DOM wizardry, but the upside is that it will work on all W3C DOM-supporting browser engines including Konqueror's KHTML and Opera (both of which do not support XMLHttpRequest last time I checked).
I hope Mozilla/Firefox support of XMLHttpRequest is decent enough nowadays so I can junk this more complex technique in favor of XMLHttpRequest.
Opera and KHTML users can wait for their browsers to be upgraded to support XMLHttpRequest... ;-)
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