XML and DHTML’s XMLHttp Request Object
It is very convenient to connect an HTML presentation directly to XML data for interium updates because XML data and web services become more wide spread, Microsoft first implemented the XMLHttp request object in internet explorer 5 for windows as an ActiveX object, the same functionality is covered in a proposed W3C standard document object model in the mean time growing support for the XMLHttp request object means that it has become the de facto standard that will likely be supported even after the W3C specifications become final and it starts

