Comments on: XMLHttpRequest Vs. iFrames

By: 0k

0k — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:19:31 +0000

I think either DOM injection or iframes will do the job. At least as far as the bandwidth and server horse power won’t let a ajax page refresh or evolve to let say show, for example, an animation where the info to be drawn homogeneously may be rendered/sent by the server really fast. We may play with that at this time on our local configs, but for drawing basic htm content remotely… I have to say that iframes are much easier/faster and cross-plateform to implement for the moment. Regarding the back-forward thing, I fully agree with Atli but something tells me that back-forwarding with anchor hashes, data cached in each iframes is really fast and enjoying on a navigation point of view so I would prefer to solve the headache with iframes or DOM based framework.

By: mario

mario — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:54:36 +0000

Ajax has one weakness witch i find a great one, and i think that people working with it should consider it much more than they do t now…
Its problem with character encodings.
When you use Ajax call it does not render special charachter encodings other than utf-8.
Also when im borwsing some sites in spanish or some scandinavian languages ive noticed that browser does not render correctly some special characters …(because i have set my browes to read char encodings form where im from)
Man that lets you with a bad test in your mouth..So we might say that A… sucks
Big idea(l)s often falls on small things!
…and we out!

By: Matching

Matching — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 06:11:01 +0000

Good! give user more experience.

By: online backgammon

online backgammon — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 11:12:53 +0000

Whatâ€™s the big deal about status? The only time I have needed any intermediate state other than â€œIâ€™m doneâ€ is when a request takes a long time and the Iframe method is actually much more poweful in that case becaue it can use progressive rendering of html.

By: diatribe » Blog Archive » Of Interest v20060304.1

diatribe » Blog Archive » Of Interest v20060304.1 — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 19:11:16 +0000

[...] Compare, XHR v iFrame [...]

By: Shy Guy

Shy Guy — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 18:52:20 +0000

I use XmlHttpRequest and feed response output to an iframe.

By: Ryan Gahl

Ryan Gahl — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 15:41:21 +0000

Indeed, Atli. DOM script injection is (IMHO), the better of all 3 approaches.

1. It requires no ActiveX
2. It’s much faster than the XMLHTTPRequest object (I’ve used both, done the tests). This is in regard to the actual construction of the object, and with regard to evaluating scripts (no clunky meniacal eval() calls).
3. Much smaller memory footprint.
4. Cross-site compatible.

By: Atli Thorbjornsson

Atli Thorbjornsson — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 09:59:32 +0000

I would have liked to see him address the third and much preferred (by me at least) method which is dynamic script inclusion. Simply adding a script object to the document is multithreaded and cross-site capable.

What’s the big deal about status? The only time I have needed any intermediate state other than “I’m done” is when a request takes a long time and the Iframe method is actually much more poweful in that case becaue it can use progressive rendering of html.

The back button is another headache altogether and is not really dependent on whether you use iframes or xmlhttprequest. If you want it to work your best bet is to implement a framework around it like the rsh object by Brad Neuberg or the related Hashlistener from Erik Arvidsen.

By: ahappylion

ahappylion — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 09:14:48 +0000

it’s easy,but very useful!!:)

By: Jeff Dill

Jeff Dill — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:00:50 +0000

Another fundamental difference is that XMLHttpRequest requires ActiveX to be enabled in Internet Explorer. This is a blocker for using XHR in many large deployments, especially b2b applications, where ActiveX is disabled for security reasons.
Of course, all of these differences can be papered over by a robust AJAX RIA framework, which automatically selects the best AJAX ‘transport’.

By: CountZero

CountZero — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 20:51:12 +0000

well, actually nothing I didn’t already know, but a real useful and comprehensive description of the differences for those who are not yet as adept with the backgrounds ;)