"Hidden?" Give IE some respect...its rendering may have been crap, but it had plenty of features like this for building robust web applications years before the cool kids realized that might be a good idea.
Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to get at, evidently unsuccessfully. For all of IE's failings, it does seem to have been first to support an awful lot of scripting features. They've always been documented, but hardly anyone seems to know about them until the other browsers popularise them, and even then IE's implementation seems to be forgotten, presumably because APIs are nonstandard and the docs use different terminology.
I was doing web dev for an agency back when IE6 was the coolest browser around, and all around me JavaScript was still very much being used only for menus and rollovers. I guess all these features were basically ahead of their time. I'd love to know what Microsoft used them for, or intended them for. I mean, they've been exercising their vested interest in not pushing rich browser-based apps for years. I know their MSDN site has been very AJAX-y since before it was cool.
XmlHTTPRequest was created by Microsoft for OWA around 2000. I remember using JSRS (http://www.ashleyit.com/rs/) at the time until Mozilla started supporting XHR. Fine times :)
Very cool. From a quick test it looks like JSRS uses a hidden IFrame; in the case of POST it's the target for a scripted hidden form submission. The response is embedded in HTML though (as a textarea no less!), which doesn't make much sense to me.
I wanted to point out the significant difference between "hidden" and "ignored". There was nothing hidden about these IE features. People just chose to ignore them. And of course they were nonstandard, just like most other new technology.
