History
In the 1990s, most web sites were based on complete HTML pages; each user action required that the page be re-loaded from the server (or a new page loaded). This process is inefficient, as reflected by the user experience: all page content disappears then reappears, etc. Each time a page is reloaded due to a partial change, all of the content must be re-sent instead of only the changed information. This can place additional load on the server and use excessive bandwidth.
In 1996, the iframe tag was introduced by Internet Explorer to load content asynchronously.
In 1998, Microsoft Outlook Web Access team implemented the first component XMLHTTP by client script.
In 1999, Microsoft utilized its iframe technology to dynamically update the news stories and stock quotes on the default page for Internet Explorer, and created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which was later adopted by Mozilla, Safari, Opera and other browsers as the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object. Microsoft has adopted the native XMLHttpRequest model as of Internet Explorer 7, though the ActiveX version is still supported. The utility of background HTTP requests to the server and asynchronous web technologies remained fairly obscure until it started appearing in full scale online applications such as Outlook Web Access (2000) and Oddpost (2002), and later, Google made a wide deployment of Ajax with Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005).
The term Ajax was coined on 18 February 2005 by Jesse James Garrett in an article entitled "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications", based on techniques used on Google pages.
On 5 April 2006 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the XMLHttpRequest object in an attempt to create an official web standard.
Read more about this topic: Ajax (programming)
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