xmlhttprequest: add interactivity to your static web pages

I've been following the development of implementations & uses for XMLHTTPRequest, which is apparently a javascript function that has been around for awhile but is only now getting attention (partly because MSIE does not support it natively except as an ActiveX thing).

Basically, from what I've been able to see and read about, this gives web designers/developers a way of adding implicit interaction between web content and an application, without the user explicitly clicking a "submit" button or the resulting transfer to a new URL, reload of page. So, you could use it to do interactive filtering of search results, display of calendars or other dynamic navigation changes, interactive validation of form data. In one sense, these are all things you can do today if you load your page with javascript or do enough magic on the server side. However it opens up the possibility of a web page feeling more like an interactive application than the old model of fetch page, read page, input data to page, hit submit and wait for something to happen.

Here are some related links, found mostly by a semi-intelligent perusal of google results:

• Web Developers: XMLHttpRequest Object Can Make Your Webpages Dynamic
• Using XMLHTTPRequest in Mozilla
• Server Side Autocompletion with PHP and XMLHttpRequest
• An example of using XMLHTTPRequest to do "live" searching: Livesearch got keyboard access
• Via clagnut/blog another Sitepoint article: Quick tip: XMLHttpRequest and innerHTML
• Curiouser and curiouser! mentions that XMLHTTPRequest is what's used at flickr and gmail.
• At devx I found: Use XMLHttpRequest Object for Communication With HTTP Servers
• via The Javascript weblog I found: Using the XML HTTP Request object
• Next generation web apps using REST, XML, XSLT, and XmlHTTPRequest
• Apple has some documentation related to the implementation in Safari: Developer Connection: Dynamic HTML and XML: The XMLHttpRequest Object
• Client Side Validation Using the XMLHTTPRequest Object
• XMLHttpRequest API madness
• XMLHttpRequest, REST and the Rich User Experience
• XMLHttpRequest for The Masses