Web Standards and W3’c Standards

Early this month, the web have finally seen the W3C first draft version of the The XMLHttpRequest Object. I consider it an extremly important move of recognizing the presence and the “treat” of the Ajax.

First of all, lets be honest – there have been a lot of the applications since the XMLHttpRequest appearance i believe it was the 5th version of the Internet Explorer, which introduced it. Since then, it has evolved, become recongized, loved and hated, made every browser on the market copy and implement it, evolve as a part of a buzz-word (web2.0) and finally achieved a status of becoming a W3C standard.

After some careful reading and analizing i have noticed, that the only property from the XMLHttpRequest MSDN documentation that didnt make into this draft was “responseBody”. Honestly i have never seen any application which would take use of this “array of unsigned bytes” – normally everyone are connecting XmlHttpRequest with the WebServices, and when you have a XML DOM in front of you, its much easier and the reasonable to deal with it with the DOM methods. Also, having the “responseText” property around is helping in the cases, when no XML is getting in the result and for the rest of the cases when some binary data is being transmitted from the server the usual “responseText” was a reasonable answer. Thinking that the binary-encoded data in the response would depend on the server, and thinking that there are no other then IE implementations of it, i also doubt that “responseBody” is going “to jump” into the final version of the document, since on the list of the authors there are no Microsoft representatives.

Finally, i would like to say some words of gratitute to Microsoft. I know that i have not been such a good friend of the “empire”, critisizing for stealing ideas, destroying ideals and so on. I also used to say that there are almost no things around, which would be created by Microsoft – only bought or stolen. This time i just have the words of the gratitude for helping javascript to advance, and for teaching me personally (once again), that there are good things on each side of the wall.