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Comment by omarforgotpwd | Hacker News Reader

Wow, didn't even know about the Fetch API. XMLHTTPRequest, the API that changed software forever by igniting a wave of more powerful browser applications, is finally going to be replaced. Funny that the last 20 years of the web were all built on this ridiculous API that Microsoft came up with to try and make Outlook work in a browser. Good riddance, but you will be missed. Not that any of us has used that disgusting API directly in the last 10 years.

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We used to do that stuff using frames back in the day. You’d have a hidden frame, change its url and look at what that dom contains. At scale, too. I was amazed at all the hoo-haa around that “new” xmlhttp API

We did the same thing, and to dynamically pull in content into the parent context, we created our own script block tag. <div type="javascript">...</div> so that we could extract the JS and eval it in the parent context. The clunky thing was that you had to hand escape reserved html characters (&, <, etc) in your JS code. So many bugs...

Wow, then I think that I jumped directly to that hoo-haa since I didn't even consider the technique you are describing, I wasn't expecting today learning something from dynamic HTML past of the web. Thanks!

Yea there were a few things like that to emulate it. Things like JSONP + document.write() were also very common, though very ugly.

It's been around for 2 years, I noticed it when github released a polyfill.

It's been great to rely on a standard function, than any of the libraries to make http requests.

I still use on axios over fetch. Mainly because fetch doesn't have abort function. axios implements cancelable promise proposal that didn't go though TC39

Tho it has been a while since I checked TC39 status on fetch

I also choose Axios over Fetch for now. I had the following post that made the case - https://medium.com/@thejasonfile/fetch-vs-axios-js-for-makin...

Thoughts?

Fetch requests do support cancelation for a while now through `AbortController`. See: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/abortable-...

Which doesn't work even in Chrome.

Fetch is a Web API, not an ECMAScript language feature, so TC39 doesn’t have much to do with it. They do do Promises though and Cancellation is a Stage 1 proposal [0], so it’s more than a year away from standardization at best.

WHATWG handles Fetch and their spec[1] was updated seven days ago.

[0] https://github.com/tc39/proposals/blob/master/README.md [1] https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org

Fetch API still cannot handle progress events, unfortunately, so it is not yet a backwards compatible replacement.

And until recently it could abort() either, but Chrome/FF/Edge all have it now (yay!) and there is a polyfill for Safari/MSIE and old browsers: https://www.npmjs.com/package/abortcontroller-polyfill

>Not that any of us has used that disgusting API directly in the last 10 years.

Well, duh. It was a lower level API, offering more control.

Fetch isn't much better. Half-arsed at best, and also needs a higher level wrapper to achieve the same terseness as popular AJAX utility libs.

> Fetch isn't much better. Half-arsed at best, and also needs a higher level wrapper to achieve the same terseness as popular AJAX utility libs.

Really?

   let response = await fetch('http://www.example.com');
   let json = await response.json();

It's not not terse.

That's just for a GET.

Sending e.g. a JSON POST request requires you to specify the content type and to manually stingify the payload.

It's better than XMLHttpRequest but not as terse as the tons of helper libraries that we used (instead of XMLHttpRequest) anyway...

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