History and Support
The concept behind the XMLHttpRequest object was originally created by the developers of Outlook Web Access (by Microsoft) for Microsoft Exchange Server 2000. An interface called IXMLHTTPRequest was developed and implemented into the second version of the MSXML library using this concept. The second version of the MSXML library was shipped with Internet Explorer 5.0 in March 1999, allowing access, via ActiveX, to the IXMLHTTPRequest interface using the XMLHTTP wrapper of the MSXML library.
The Mozilla project developed and implemented an interface called nsIXMLHttpRequest into the Gecko layout engine. This interface was modeled to work as closely to Microsoft's IXMLHTTPRequest interface as possible. Mozilla created a wrapper to use this interface through a JavaScript object which they called XMLHttpRequest. The XMLHttpRequest object was accessible as early as Gecko version 0.6 released on December 6 of 2000, but it was not completely functional until as late as version 1.0 of Gecko released on June 5, 2002. The XMLHttpRequest object became a de facto standard in other major web clients, implemented in Safari 1.2 released in February 2004, Konqueror, Opera 8.0 released in April 2005, and iCab 3.0b352 released in September 2005.
The World Wide Web Consortium published a Working Draft specification for the XMLHttpRequest object on April 5, 2006, edited by Anne van Kesteren of Opera Software and Dean Jackson of W3C. Its goal is "to document a minimum set of interoperable features based on existing implementations, allowing Web developers to use these features without platform-specific code." The last revision to the XMLHttpRequest object specification was on November 19 of 2009, being a last call working draft.
Microsoft added the XMLHttpRequest object identifier to its scripting languages in Internet Explorer 7.0 released in October 2006.
With the advent of cross-browser JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and the Prototype JavaScript Framework, developers can invoke XMLHttpRequest functionality without coding directly to the API. Prototype provides an asynchronous requester object called Ajax.Request that wraps the browser's underlying implementation and provides access to it. jQuery objects represent or wrap elements from the current client-side DOM. They all have a .load method that takes a URI parameter and makes an XMLHttpRequest to that URI, then by default places any returned HTML into the HTML element represented by the jQuery object.
The W3C has since published another Working Draft specification for the XMLHttpRequest object, "XMLHttpRequest Level 2", on February 25 of 2008. Level 2 consists of extended functionality to the XMLHttpRequest object, including, but not currently limited to, progress events, support for cross-site requests, and the handling of byte streams. The latest revision of the XMLHttpRequest Level 2 specification is that of 16 August 2011, which is still a working draft.
As of 5 December 2011 (2011 -12-05), XMLHttpRequest version 2 has been merged into the main XMLHttpRequest specification, and there is no longer a version 1 and a version 2.
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