Section I.11. De Facto Standards

I.11. De Facto Standards

As helpful as the W3C standards efforts are, they don't always provide the full range of features that could be helpful to the daily work of client-side programmers. This is especially true of the DOM. Content authors and scripters got accustomed to numerous practical features that Microsoft had built into the IE 4 DOM, such as the innerHTML property of element objects mentioned earlier. When it appeared that the W3C had no interest in adding much-appreciated properties to its DOM recommendation, browser makers other than Microsoft adopted the features on their own. Such features are now so prevalent in Mozilla, Safari, and Opera that they have become de facto standards that cross-browser developers rely on.

This development became crucial for the widespread adoption of an object known as the XMLHttpRequest object (prior to the W3C stepping in). First available in IE 5, this object allows scripts to communicate with servers asynchronously (i.e., silently in the background and independent of other running scripts). Data returned from the server (typically in XML format) could then be extracted with JavaScript and inserted into the current web page view without having to reload the whole page. Outside of Microsoft, first Mozilla, then Safari, and more recently Opera implemented this object so that those browsers now participate in functionality that has been coined Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript with XML). In a rare case of a de facto standard influencing its originator, Microsoft made this object a native (non-ActiveX) object in IE 7 so that scripters could use the same syntax across browsers to create an instance of the object.