IE7 To Support XMLHTTP Requests 238
Ruliz Galaxor writes "IEBlog posts that Internet Explorer 7 will support a native XMLHTTPRequest object as many other browsers currently do. This will mean no more ActiveX MSXML objects to implement AJAX functionality. It looks like Microsoft is seriously trying to make the lives of us web developers easier. Of course you'll still need to use the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX object if you want to support IE6 and older."
Program Managers Anonymous? (Score:5, Funny)
It's OK, we understand ...
Re:Program Managers Anonymous? (Score:5, Funny)
>
> It's OK, we understand
1) We admitted we were powerless over the cruft - that the code base had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our specs and our code over to the care of Gates as we understood Him.
4) Made a recursive search and complete manifest of our source files.
5) Admitted to Gates, to ourselves, and to another developer the exact nature of our design flaws.
6) Were entirely ready to have Gates fire our sorry asses.
7) Humbly asked Him to allocate the budget for the security upgrades.
8) Made a list of all bugs we had let slip into the released codebase, and became willing to provide patches for them all.
9) Provided patches to such systems wherever possible, except when to do so would break existing functionality or introduce new security holes.
10) Continued to monitor the security mailing lists, and when we were notified of an exploit, promptly fixed the bug.
11) Sought through coding and specification to improve our conscious contact with Gates, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to program managers, and to practice these principles in all our projects.
Re:Program Managers Anonymous? (Score:2)
Backwards Compatability (Score:4, Insightful)
Which means that browser type checking will need to remain pretty much for the forseable future. Inclusion of XMLHTTPRequest now is nice, but in practical terms its perfectly meaningless.
Re:Backwards Compatability (Score:4, Insightful)
Good call! After all, why in the hell should Microsoft make web developer's lives easier in the future? It's complicated now!
Re:Backwards Compatability (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, but look at it this way, how many times do software companies do something perfectly?
Re:Backwards Compatability (Score:2)
Re:Backwards Compatability (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true. The point of it is that a user or company can disable ActiveX completely and still use AJAX.
And still get pwn3d (Score:2)
Story: http://namb.la/popular/ [namb.la]
Technical Explanation: http://namb.la/popular/tech.html [namb.la]
He did all of his GETs and POSTs using XML-HTTP
Re:And still get pwn3d (Score:2)
Re:Backwards Compatability (Score:2)
Re:Backwards Compatability (Score:2)
Re:Backwards Compatability (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Backwards Compatability (Score:3, Interesting)
if (native XMLHTTPREquest) {
do native stuff
}
else if (ActiveX XMLHTTPRequest) {
do ActiveX stuff
}
else {
non-AJAX fallback
}
In a few years it'll be practical to drop the middle section, assuming XMLHTTPRequest hasn't been replaced by something more useful.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Looks like Microsoft has a winning strategy . . (Score:2)
While geeks might not wanna confess, IE7 might indeed be just as good for what BUSINESSES want their browsers to do.
And this is tight security, speed (Firefox has to catch up here) and easy installation (i.e. no installation, it's preinstalled).
IE7 is a big step in the right direction, including standards support.
Re:Looks like Microsoft has a winning strategy . . (Score:2)
Riiiiight. I just read (and commented on) a comment that says that someone got owned on the 'net by just browsing with IE7, and I believe it (though the plural of anecdote is not data...) Granted, it's in beta, but it's not all that clear that there is any security to speak of. It was probably the WMF back door (I still want to call it this whether it's intentional or not, even though it's technically incorrect if it's not intentional) but even so, that doesn't seem like attention to sec
Re:Looks like Microsoft has a winning strategy . . (Score:2)
His IE7 beta was most likely not patched against the WMF exploit. Also don't forget that IE7 is extra secure under Vista (and the XP SP2 release was a compromise from start).
Re:Looks like Microsoft has a winning strategy . . (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And...? (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks like Microsoft is seriously trying to make the lives of us web developers easier.
MS deserves credit for this sensible implementation of XMLHTTPRequest, and indeed for innovating XMLHTTPRequest in the first place.
Now if MS is "seriously trying to make the lives of us web developers easier" [when] will they implement the rest of the core W3C web standards?
FF, Opera and Safari and their respective communities are already well advanced with implementations of SVG, DOM, CSS, PNG, JPEG2000 and XForms. These standards are bread and butter for "seriously trying to make the lives of us web developers easier".
When will MS join the inevitable?
Re:And...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft has proven it can make a good web browser. When they are backed into a corner.
oh let's not talk standards (Score:4, Informative)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1071
Note this bug was opened in 1999. Judging from the target milestone (mozilla1.9) and the FireFox roadmap, we will have full CSS2 support in FireFox 3.0 by 2007. Wow, eight years...
Re:oh let's not talk standards (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just eye candy, IE6's flaws are deep and pervasive. If IE7 can fix some of these that'll be a big step forward.
Mozilla's most important CSS2 shortfall is support for inline-block, but as with other properties, no support is better than buggy support.
Re:oh let's not talk standards (Score:2)
It would be a huge world-changing event if MS didn't implement anything new and just fixed the BUGS in IE6's CSS engine.
Informative my ass! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:oh let's not talk standards (Score:2)
To make some numbers up, supporting 90% of the spec is still a lot better than supporting 70%, especially when people have found really nifty [meyerweb.com] things you can do [howtocreate.co.uk] with that extra 20%.
Re:oh let's not talk standards (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:oh let's not talk standards (Score:5, Informative)
* display: compact and inline-block
* content: counters and quotes (recent version has quotes)
* min/max-width/heigth (recent versions support it very limited)
There are a couple more. These are also the primary reasons Firefox cannot easily pass Acid2.
true (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-CSS-TECHS-2004 0730/#text-shadow [w3.org]
My point was that FireFox/Gecko is not the paragon of standards compliance, so dragging IE into the "you don't comply" mud is hypocritical. Indeed there are more important things to make work, but nevertheless, compliance is incomplete.
To that effect, since CSS2 came out in 1998, and CSS2.1 in 2005, I would have expected text-shadow (along with the other things you listed) to get fixed in that time frame. What have the FireFox de
Re:true (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:oh let's not talk standards (Score:2)
No it doesn't. CSS 2.1 has draft status. More accurately, text-shadow will be deprecated, for CSS level 2, once CSS 2.1 is finalised. And that only applies to CSS level 2 - CSS level 3 might put it back in again [w3.org].
Re:oh let's not talk standards (Score:3, Informative)
No, inline-block is present in a draft of the CSS 2.1 specification. Before that, it was a proprietary Internet Explorer property. It wasn't part of CSS 2.0, it wasn't part of CSS 1.0, and it isn't part of any finished CSS specification yet.
Re:And...? (Score:4, Insightful)
SVG: Microsoft implemented vector graphics in Internet Explorer years ago with VML, which they submitted to the W3C in 1998 [w3.org].
CSS: A partial list of fixes regarding CSS that will be in Internet Explorer 7 can be found on the IEBlog [msdn.com]. They've fixed a lot.
PNG: Internet Explorer 7 will have support for the PNG alpha channel [msdn.com], bringing it up to the level of support that other browsers have.
JPEG2000: JPEG2000 is patent encumbered [theinquirer.net]. Mozilla/Firefox doesn't support it [mozilla.org].
XForms: XForms support is available through a plugin [formsplayer.com].
The only really valid complaint you have there is their lack of support for the DOM. In particular, it would be very nice if they implemented DOM 2 Events, but I don't think that's likely to happen for Internet Explorer 7.
Re:And...? (Score:2)
I suppose you're just trolling but +5 Funny even if you are.
VML is not SVG in the same way that 1998 is not 2006 and your grandmother is not Jessica Alba. More than that, MS never came close to fully implementing its own spec for VML in IE. The rendering in IE does not even support line widths or relative coordinates, and the spec doesn't even mention compression.
Re:And...? (Score:2)
I'm not trolling. I know VML is not SVG. SVG is featuritis run amok. What the hell are the W3C thinking, adding audio [w3.org], video [w3.org] and network request [w3.org] functionality to a vector image format?
SVG has been around since the year 2000, and yet browsers are only just starting to implement SVG Tiny (not even SVG Full). If the W3C continue to throw everything but the kitchen sink into SVG, browser support will never be finished.
As for compression, why should VML be concerned with that? SVG shouldn't be concer
Re:And...? (Score:2)
Re:And...? (Score:2)
Straw men, the lot of them. I'm not arguing for a silent web, I'm arguing that it shouldn't be a graphics format that does the sound. I'm not arguing that content on the web should be completely disconnected from everything else, I'm arguing that pictures shouldn't be the things talking to the server. I'm not arguing that filesizes must be enourmous, I'm arguing that a problem that has already been solved does not need to be solved again.
Re:And...? (Score:3, Informative)
Only Firefox/Mozilla has XForms; sadly Opera and Safari don't.
XForms, by the way, is the only stanrd to incorporate all the stuff that XMLTTHPRequest does, and it does so in a very easy way.
For example, if you want to load up your del.icio.us tags you just do this in the <head>:
<instance src="http://del.icio.us/api/tags/get"
Then you can list them like this in the HTML <body>:
Re:And...? (Score:2)
Here's a list of what they were anticipating having for beta 2 [msdn.com]:
Plus a bunch of bug fixes. I can think of things I could do with every single one of these, and while I'd like more (say, max-width a
Only for Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
Can someone tell me if this means that I no longer have to take my business elsewhere when I encounter a "Sorry, this site only loads in Windows?"
I dig that stuff that requires the DRM WMP still may not let me in, but what about other things?
Can I hope that Safari and friends will no longer be a second class citizen on Exchange WebMail, for example?
Re:Only for Windows? (Score:2)
IE is changing its tune (Score:4, Interesting)
When the IE blog began I was angered that they didn't seem to be worried about the numerous CSS flaws, among other bugs. They seemed like they were just trying to beef up security. As time marched on, though, the developers seemed to be taking notice to what most of the replies were about. The IE developers listened and really went the extra mile where the concerns of web developers everywhere are concerned.
While there are a few things I'd love to see (like the ability to properly deliver XHTML), I'm happy (for now) with the changes they're implementing. It sounds like they're really committed to helping web developers from having to design their website three or more times before they get a version that's decent looking in all browsers.
Let's give the guys some credit where credit is due... who knows, maybe the rest of Micro$oft will take the hint.
Hopefully, they'll keep the ActiveX Object... (Score:3)
Re:Hopefully, they'll keep the ActiveX Object... (Score:2)
Re:Hopefully, they'll keep the ActiveX Object... (Score:2)
MS doing what it does best ... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's good that MS is supporting web standards, but I doubt the reason is to play nice and make the lives of web developers easier. IMHO, MS realized that they have lost a lot of ground, credibility and following in the browser market. Any new "innovations" coming from MS will NOT be adopted very easily these days unless Firefox, Safari and Opera endorse it. So, before it can repeat what it did to Netscape, MS needs to re-capture its lost browser market share. The easiest way to do that is to come up with a really great browser that supports all the current web technologies, and that is easier to code for than other browsers. Classic 'embrace'. Once it has done that, and it has all the time and money in the world for it to do that, only then can it can start phase 2, the 'extend' phase where it renders all other browsers obsolete.
The only way to combat MS on this front is to keep innovating, staying a step in front of it. Netscape made the mistake of not updating their browser soon enough, and they paid dearly. I hope Opera, Firefox and Safari have learned that lesson.
Re:MS doing what it does best ... (Score:3, Interesting)
But it won't happen that way this time. When Netscape died (the first time), there really were only two browsers in the market. When one didn't keep up, the other took over.
This time around, there are lots of different browsers all working independently. Even if one br
Re:MS doing what it does best ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just so we stay clear about this: MS was the first to support AJAX via XMLHttpRequest, so this is only a change in how they do it.
Mozilla and Opera followed Internet Explorer here.
The easiest way to do that is to come up with a really great browser that supports all the current web technologies, and that is easier to code for than other browsers.
Again, IE was the first to do.
Once it has done that, and it has all the time and money in the world for it to do that,
Re:MS doing what it does best ... (Score:2)
Correct. I'm aware of that. But this goes way beyond just XMLHttpRequest. Think PNG support, SVG support and other technologies that IE6 does not support (or at least didn't for a very long time).
Hoq do implementing XmlHttpRequest support via non-ActiveX render other browser that already have it obsolete? This isn't some weird "lock out" strategy. Please lose your tinfoil h
Re:MS doing what it does best ... (Score:2)
Just so we stay clear about this, but Mozilla was the first to support ``AJAX'' via the XMLHttpRequest object.
MS supports the same interface (and may have originated the interface) with an ActiveX control.
I have web applications that use an interface similar to XMLHttpRequest that worked in Netscape 3, including asynchronous GET/POST operations from JavaScript using Java.
Re:MS doing what it does best ... (Score:3, Insightful)
As I understand it, anyway. I've probably got something wrong though.
Except that.... (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft invented XMLHttpRequest. Not Firefox, not opera, not KHTML. They all copied it from IE.
So it would be Firefox/Opera/KHTML that are doing the "embracing and extending" in this case.
On a side note, I don't see why this is a big deal. They are likely still going to use a COM object underneath. All this is is a coding shortcut, that no one will be able to use anyway because you're still going to have to support IE6 for the next 3 years at least.
Re:Except that.... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you RTFA you'll see the benefit is for those organisations that have ActiveX turned off for security reasons (lots of em).
On the IEBlog you have a code snippet showing how you create the native XMLHttpRequest object for Opera, FF and IE7, while fall back to ActiveX for IE6 and earlier.
So there IS benefit. And no, it's not a simple scripting shortcut at all.
But will their web apps? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But will their web apps? (Score:2)
A Nice Step (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:A Nice Step (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes more sense?
Which do you think is the healthy, competitive scenario? Which do you think hands control of the future of the web over to a single organisation?
iFrames? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously. IFrame support has been around for quite some time and works well in most major browsers. You just hide the iframe and communicate to the server through it. I've done this lots of times, long before AJAX was around. It even worked in IE 4 and NS 4.7x if I remember right.
Sure, its not as elegant as using XMLHTTPRequest, but when is cross-browser javascript ever elegant? Is it better to have a hidden iframe on your
Re:iFrames? (Score:2)
When you use Prototype [conio.net] to its full capability. Yes it requires a 'modern' browser, but your page should work without Javascript anyway. If you're going to use Javascript you may as well use it to its full extent. Prototype bridges an awful lot of gaps... I daresay more than 99% of JS developers could ever manage on their own, and it does it with style.
What Internet Explorer 7 *REALLY* needs... (Score:5, Informative)
What IE really needs right now, if it wants to be taken seriously as a platform for AJAX web applications, is proper DOM/CSS support. The following would be a good start (my current peeve list with IE6):
I've posted this on ieblog before. I sincerely hope that somehow someone on the IE team sees one my numerous implementations of the above list of rants and implements solutions for them. It'll make the professional lives of many AJAX developers quite a bit more pleasant.
Re:What Internet Explorer 7 *REALLY* needs... (Score:2)
This will be fixed in Internet Explorer 7 [msdn.com].
Re:What Internet Explorer 7 *REALLY* needs... (Score:2)
Re:What Internet Explorer 7 *REALLY* needs... (Score:2)
Sorry but your list sounds like a random wishlist for what YOU want, so to consider IE a serious platform.
Microsoft instead, decided to listen to the feedback of more than one developers, and if you go to IEBlog you'll see a list of improvements and bugfixes that the majority of the developers need from the browser.
I'd say they're hitting the jackpot with the stuff they fix in beta 2 and for the
Re:What Internet Explorer 7 *REALLY* needs... (Score:2)
Re:What Internet Explorer 7 *REALLY* needs... (Score:2, Interesting)
Definitely agree that all my listed issues can be worked around, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it's trivial to do so. Here are the current workarounds I use in IE for these problems:
Work vs. Personal Coding (Score:3, Interesting)
For work, I guess I will still have to plan workarounds for IE6. However, I generally only support such browsers officially as long as they receive actual support from their publishers. So, as soon as MS drops support for IE6, so will I (unless I'm ordered to keep it up).
Personally, I code to whatever standard I've chosen for the day. If I decided to code to CSS 2.1 and I can see it properly in my browser, well, then I'm happy. Because it's my personal stuff. And if IE7 supports something and IE6 doesn't, well too bad. And same goes for Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, and Opera (although it'll be rare that Opera causes me problems, except when a version has tried to pretend it was IE, but that was work anyway).
Mostly now, since I've grown into being some lazy business analyst with a messy house under renovation, I just blog anyway.
Not news (Score:5, Informative)
Firstly, this is not news. This was posted on the IEBlog way back in September [msdn.com].
Secondly, this is one hell of a misleading headline. Internet Explorer has supported this interface since Internet Explorer 5.0, released in the year 2000. All that's different in Internet Explorer 7 is that it's implemented as a native object, rather than with ActiveX.
Finally, this matters to practically nobody. Any decently-written code will work just fine in Internet Explorer 7 with no modification whatsoever. Even code written to use browser detection instead of feature/object detection, (a bad idea [jibbering.com]) will work just fine, assuming that the ActiveX interface sticks around too.
Re:Not news (Score:2)
Re:Not news (Score:3, Informative)
This is already possible today with Internet Explorer's zones. Put GMail etc in a zone with ActiveX enabled, and disable ActiveX for everything else.
Re:Not news (Score:2)
Are you referring to the part of the summary that says:
I assume you are not a native English speaker? To native English speakers, this is synonymous with "you don't need to use ActiveX MSXML object to implement Ajax functionality". It does not mean "they have taken away ActiveX MSXML objects".
If you check TFA, you will see that they will not take away the ActiveX MSXML objects. I quote:
Ajax over IFRAME - more compatible? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ajax over IFRAME - more compatible? (Score:2)
I was doing dynamic web stuff with this before xml was even a buzzword. You can do a lot of cool stuff just passing javascript objects back and forth without even touching xml. In some ways it's even more usefull than xmlhttprequest objects.
But everyone got so swept up in the hype of all this AJAX stuff that hardly anyone even remembers this stuff anymore
Re:Ajax over IFRAME - more compatible? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.phpit.net/article/ajax-php-without-xmlh ttprequest/ [phpit.net]
Re:Ajax over IFRAME - more compatible? (Score:2)
Re:Ajax over IFRAME - more compatible? (Score:3, Informative)
1) IE makes a 'click' sound every time you navigate to a new url in a window or frame. using xmlHttpRequest gets rid of this.
2) Using xmlHttpRequest doesn't pollute your history, so it makes it a easier to make something useful happen when the user hits the back or forward button.
Generally speaking, compatibility isn't a problem- most of the time that I need to implement som
Re:Ajax over IFRAME - more compatible? (Score:2)
Most of the time it seems like having the back button work on an ajax page would be a bug, not a feature. Why not just implement your own back/forward buttons if people need them so badly? Seems a lot easier, if not simpler for the user...
Embrace, extend, extinguish (Score:2)
Microsoft often moves to support standards, but then tweaks their behavior in such a way that the net result favors their implementation. This behavior even has a name. [wikipedia.org] Yes, I see that the Microsoft employee says their implementation is consistent with other browsers, but for how long? And how consistent is it now, really?
You're welcome to be upbeat about Microsoft's intensions, but history has shown other
IE7XMLHTTP?? (Score:3, Funny)
ISV's lives become easier. (Score:3, Interesting)
I work on solution designs for a fairly large ISV, anything that increases browser compatibility is a good thing all around. Most of our end-user interfaces and make use of XML with some XSLT on the client, we also use XMLHTTPRequests..
Due to pure market pressure from our existing userbase we develop for the IE platform. IE isn't for everyone and ideally we'd like to target every browser from a technical standpoint and we know it increases the number of potential customers we have. We move one step closer to genuine cross browser compatibility with this.
Despite this we still need ActiveX right now for a couple of key things:
- File uploading, we used Java already and it went badly. Our customers had real problems with getting correct JRE versions out to their users, the users complained about the lack of standardisation in basic things like the Common Dialog. We've had a lot less problems with ActiveX controls but understandably network admins really don't like it.
- MS Office Automation. Part of our product is business reporting, it has features around automated generation of Powerpoint Presentations and Excel Spreadsheets from the web interface. We can't influence our customers decisions around Office systems but we've never encountered pushback over MS Office from anybody. MS Office automation needs ActiveX and is way outside sandbox (local processes are launched and these have access to all kinds of things).
In short, this helps but we are still a way off from being able to deliver fully functional web-based business systems with this but it helps. As an enthusiast I like it, as a real world solution developer it doesn't quite make a dent.
Re:ISV's lives become easier. (Score:2)
What's wrong with using HTML file uploads [w3.org]?
This is newsworthy? (Score:2, Funny)
OK...slightly newsworthy...
The guy's an inbred, with dumb-as-dirt parents.
The guy's an overweight diabetic needing constant dialysis.
The guy's a cripple with glass for bones that can and will break whenever touched.
AND...The guy is the paperboy/newsman (information provider) for hundreds of thousands of people.
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I dunno.... (Score:5, Informative)
What the hell are you talking about ? Microsoft invented the damn thing. Embrace and extend my ass...
Embrace and extend my ass... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I dunno.... (Score:2)
Get a clue. They have THE implementation. They invented it. This is one of the rare cases where everyone else is copying Microsoft.
Re:I dunno.... (Score:2)
I see a few everyday, they're all running XFCE or Fluxbox ; )
Good point, though.
Re:I dunno.... (Score:2)
They had the first implementation.
Re:Still won't make me change (Score:2)
Having an attitude that you don't care simply because you don't use it doesn't mean that it doesn't effect someone else.
Re:Microsoft following a (de facto) standard? (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft following a (de facto) standard? (Score:2)
Of course you do. Enjoy your Betamax and Edison record collection.
Meanwhile, the rest of reality requires that once people start using GetDiskFreeSpace() that it should always yield useful results, even when you really want people to start using GetDiskFreeSpaceEx() unless you want people with disks that have 30GB free to get "out of disk space errors" when they try to install a 300K application.
See, standards are about usage. Once it's out there; once the API i
Re:Microsoft following a (de facto) standard? (Score:2)
The real point is that they had a good idea (none can deny this). Implementation, documentation and support has not been of the same level of the idea.
While Mozilla's implementation (of a non original idea) has proved to be much better!
Re:Microsoft following a (de facto) standard? (Score:2)
No, it didn't make it difficult to implement in other operating systems, it just meant that instantiation should be different. Remember that other browsers don't have to copy Microsoft's implementation, merely the interface.
The interface is documented on MSDN [microsoft.com].
Re:Microsoft following a (de facto) standard? (Score:2)
Good standards should allow anyone to implement it the very same way!
Therefore I'd say that Microsoft invented the XMLHTTPRequest objec, but the standard is not its!
Re:So basically... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh, I can't wait! (Score:2)
Re:Finally (Score:2)
Like a Microsoft version of UNIX [wikipedia.org]? :P
Re:IE7... (Score:2)
Except for a long while now you have to manually add a site to the list of allowed sites that can install XPI software. If Firefox were the only browser do you think people who would actually not know better about clicking "Install" would be smart enough to figure that out?