Power Users

Defination of AJAX

Although the term "Ajax" was coined in 2005, most histories of the technologies that enable Ajax start a decade earlier with Microsoft's initiatives in developing Remote Scripting.

Techniques for the asynchronous loading of content on an existing Web page without requiring a full reload date back as far as the IFRAME element type (introduced in Internet Explorer 3 in 1996) and the LAYER element type (introduced in Netscape 4 in 1997, abandoned during early development of Mozilla). Both element types had a src attribute that could take any external URL, and by loading a page containing JavaScript that manipulated the parent page, Ajax-like effects could be attained.

This set of client-side technologies was usually grouped together under the generic term of DHTML. Macromedia's Flash could also, from version 4, load XML and CSV files from a remote server without requiring a browser refresh.

Microsoft's Remote Scripting (or MSRS, introduced in 1998) acted as a more elegant replacement for these techniques, with data being pulled in by a Java applet with which the client side could communicate using JavaScript. This technique worked on both Internet Explorer version 4 and Netscape Navigator version 4 onwards. Microsoft then created the XMLHttpRequest object in Internet Explorer version 5 and first took advantage of these techniques using XMLHttpRequest in Outlook Web Access supplied with the Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 release.

AJAX is based on the following open standards:

JavaScript
XML
HTML
CSS

The open standards used in AJAX are well defined, and supported by all major browsers. AJAX applications are browser and platform independent. (Cross-Platform, Cross-Browser technology)

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