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Alex Hopmann
Personal blog · alexhopmann.comprogrammingweb
Alex Hopmann's personal blog at alexhopmann.com covers programming and web. Since 2008, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “The story of XMLHTTP”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alex Hopmann's first-hand account of how XMLHttpRequest was built at Microsoft for Outlook Web Access, including who wrote and extended it. It is cited as the origin story of XHR.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal tech blog covering software development, travel, and technology
Most-linked posts?
- The story of XMLHTTP6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-02-11
- Story of XMLHTTP (2007)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-01
What Hacker News says?
Alex Hopperman talks about XMLHttpRequest starting as an initiative to port exchange/outlook email to a browser: http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm XMLHTTP actually began its life out of the Exchange 2000 team. I had joined Microsoft in November 1996 and moved to Redmond in the spring of 1997 working initially on some Internet Standards stuff as related to the future of Outlook […] I don’t recall exactly when we…
Comment linking /xmlhttp.htm
on “Demystifying CORS”Submitted Story of XMLHTTP (2007) as a story · 73 points
HN discussionIt would be remiss to not mention Shawn Bracewell in the discussion. According to Alex Hopmann, Shawn was responsible for adding asynchronous support: "Step one was to bring the code up to production quality so we got Shawn Bracewell, one of the devs on the OWA team to take it over. Being a smart guy he promptly threw away all of my code and rewrote it in a more solid fashion, adding async support, error handling an…
Comment linking /xmlhttp.htm
on “Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?”Submitted Why it's called XMLHttpRequest as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSlightly different story at http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm with an update regarding Bosworth: Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I'm probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to…
Comment linking /xmlhttp.htm
on “Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?”Submitted The story of XMLHTTP as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhat you're saying is technically true, but only because the XML classes are historically also (unfortunately) DOM classes. It's too bad that XML DOM can't be made into Transferrables (losing their DOM'iness) in modern browsers and thus usable in Web Workers. I suppose XML isn't that widely used in the browser, so that would never happen. Read the history of XHR and you'll get a fascinating look at how clever teams…
Comment linking /story-of-xmlhttp/
on “HTML 5.1 is a W3C Recommendation”Submitted Microsoft Velocity and Memcache as a story · 2 points
HN discussionXMLHttpRequest is not a hack. It was deliberately developed by Microsoft as part of Internet Explorer to enable desktop-like functionality in Outlook Web Access. [ http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm ]. It was then copied by Netscape, and it spread from there.
Comment linking /xmlhttp.htm
on “The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk”