W3C reined that in, and the W3C staff people are the real deal. Though eventually big browser vendors were able to push through whatever they wanted, maybe sometimes sabotage things they don't like (e.g, HTML5 Offline mechanisms competing with browser vendor's app store), etc.

Amazingly, this still happens today.

I run into it occasionally. Most recently over the weekend on a county voter registration web site which stated that Internet Explorer was "required."

9/10 (maybe 99/100) times, the issue has nothing to do with the browser, but these questions have a strong normalizing effect. Even if the browser has nothing to do with it, people who don't know better will stick to Chrome, "just to be safe".

My team was blown away when I delivered pages that dynamically changed with fresh data without the user having to interact with it, and without page refreshes or auto-refreshed iframes. Of course it only worked in IE but that was OK.

The server-side data format I chose was XML since that was in vogue.

People mostly didn't think of it until XHR became popular.

I know, you're thinking JSON didn't exist back then, I must be trolling.

I'm not, and it did!

JSON is short for "JavaScript Object Notation". With rare exceptions, it's valid JavaScript already! So JSONP only needs pure JavaScript, nothing else.

However, back then it wasnt necessary to use object notation at all. As it was returning a script to run, the script could just call functions directly instead of assembling an object.

Aside from JavaScript, people also used a Java applet or Flash to do the communication (faster than JSONP) as most browsers had at least one of those installed. Java and Flash could both be called from JavaScript.

IE4 implemented XML Data Islands with Java Applets, anyone could do it.

MSXML XMLHTTP was ActiveX component, as was one of the crossorigin tools - Flash, anyone could do it.

I have to check JSONP support.

Plugins like flash and java applets were non-starters for many enterprises.

XML Data Islands, as I recall, did not do any network requests. They were chunks of XML. Anyone could not do network requests with XML Data Islands.

RSExecute... I looked it up. Ok I stand corrected although it is not clear when that was released for IE.

JSONP? What? JSON did not exist back then. Are you trolling?

> Copyright 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Versions above are from the article [1].

XML Data Islands network requests:

    <OBJECT width=0 height=0
      classid="clsid:550dda30-0541-11d2-9ca9-0060b0ec3d39"
      id="xmldso">
    </OBJECT>
    <SCRIPT for=window event=onload>
      var doc = xmldso.XMLDocument;
      doc.load("books.xml");

>>>> You could even do that before XmlHttpRequest

MSXML is just a widely deployed ActiveX control, not part of the browser like favicon. Anyone could implement it or java applet.

[1] https://daurril.org/wrox/ASPToday/990930-191.htm

http://web.archive.org/web/20070210004825/http://www.alexhop...