The W3C has now moved to try
and establish a standard for Ajax (see www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest).
nNote ActiveX is a Microsoft technology that enables components within the operating system to communicate
with each other. Using JavaScript with ActiveX, you can actually interact with many applications
stored on the client??™s machine (if installed). For example, given a loose security setting, you can open
Microsoft Office applications, interact with them, and even copy data out of them??”all from a web page.
The same can actually be done with any application that offers a component object model (COM) interface.
CHAPTER 1 n THE STATE OF JAVASCRIPT 3
I mentioned XML as being one of the core tenets of Ajax, and you might wonder how XML
fits into all this. As Jesse James Garrett originally describes, Ajax incorporates XML as a data
interchange format, XSLT as a manipulation format, and XHTML as a presentation format.
While XML was originally described as a major component of Ajax, that strict description has
loosened and now describes the process of communicating with the server via JavaScript
using the XMLHttpRequest object and the many technologies that are involved in implementing
a site or an application using Ajax (such as HTML and JSON).
Ajax enables communication with the server without requiring a page refresh. But what
does that mean to you? It gives you the ability to perform asynchronous actions (hence the
first A in Ajax).
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