[whatwg] RE: Degrading of web applications

[Didier PH Martin]

Hi Jim,

> > The point I was
> > making is that current web applications don't have a requirement to
> > degrade nicely for older browsers if they're built using technology
> > only available to the latest browsers.
> 
> What sort of technologies are you talking about?  the xmlhttprequest
> object for example can easily degrade - easier than most things of
> course as it can truly control the HTTP headers.
> 

If your app needs absolutely to communicate with a server through an HTTP
channel then on most recent browsers and in both Mozilla and IE you can use
xmlHttpRequest. However on older ones you'll need to use a different
technology based on frames as knownow is doing (ref: http://knownow.com )

Other point, in both cases (xmlHttpRequest and frames) you can only
communicate with servers on the same domain as the document creating the
client's app (in the case of HTML, or XML+XSLT). In order to communicate
with servers providing some web services and which are located in other
domains, then you'll need to create a "re-director" server located inside
your domain.

Cheers
Didier PH Martin