[thelist] GET requests and sent content

[Khurt Williams]

Please see http://jibbering.com/2002/4/httprequest.html


On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 20:57:28 -0700, Courtenay <court3nay at gmail.com> wrote:
> I do a similar thing on one of my sites but due to my lack of  XMLHTTP
> knowledge, I use a few kludges.  The sites contain a lot of data that
> the user can edit, more than 20 (long) fields in a form, and sometimes
> up to 80.  Unfortunately necessary, but they only tend to change one
> or two fields (status updates and the like)
> 
> - The form contains many fields (like a grid).  I check if
> defaultValue == value, and remove any nodes which haven't been
> changed.  This usually cuts a 20 field page down to one or two.
> - Then I create an IFrame, append it to the DOM tree, submit the form
> to that.  The resulting page, which is extremely lightweight, calls a
> function in the opener (main) document, to notify of success or
> failure, by passing variables or objects.  Netflix kinda does this
> with their star ranking system.
> - This function clears the form off the page and reveals (or creates)
> a new DIV on the page along the lines of 'thankyou, form submitted'.
> with the result that there is minimal data transferrance.
> 
> Without javascript, or older javascript, or non-DOM, the whole thing
> degrades gracefully, the form gets submitted  (to a different
> handler), and the user sees pretty much the same thing, except, it
> takes a (bit) longer and there is a flurry of data going back and
> forth, and the inevitable page reload.  This way the whole thing works
> even in your grandpa's browser, and as the javascript is in an
> external file, can be cached and only needs to load once for the site.
>  Score!
> 
> The idea for the IFrame came from an excellent Apple developer article
> 
> http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/iframe.html
> 
> Does anyone have a link to doing the same thing with XMLHTTP?  I know
> nothing about it (time to check that O'Reilly safari subscription?)
> Or if you have any better ideas ;)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 18:08:41 -0700, Mark Groen <markgroen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Paul Bennett wrote:
> > >
> > > > I have been told
> > > > by the very knowledgable lead developer that normal form get and post
> > > > requests also send back the entire html of the page they are on and
> > > > hence they use JS to minimize the size of the sent data.
> > > >
> > > > This to me seems ludicrous.
> >
> > I think Hassan is right on this one and you misinterpeted the
> > conversation. As you say, this developer is considered very
> > knowledgable, and it's learned fairly early in basic html classes that
> > forms send a set of data to the server. Don't think he meant the
> > entire file gets sent back to the server, but rather the response to
> > the client from the data sent in the "other/unwanted" method, was to
> > serve another page with the new data, rather than just replacing what
> > was needed.
> >
> > Hassan: "Using, say, XMLHTTP to retrieve a small XML dataset clearly uses less
> > bandwidth, since the page markup itself isn't discarded and replaced."
> >
> > cheers,
> >
> >        Mark
> >
> >
> > --
> >
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> 
> 
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-- 
Sincerely,
Khurt Williams
http://ossnews.blogspot.com