The birth of AJAX - an amazing story

"Gmail was the first most interactive web based email client which actually used the XMLHttpRequest to make a rich internet interface providing asynchronus behaviour thus making the email client more user friendly than any other in those days of 2004"

Aside from the atrocious writing, it seems to me this is mistaken: wasn't Oddpost the first web-based email client to take advantage of AJAX-style techniques?

The essence of Ajax is getting Javascript to communicate with the server without reloading the page. Although XmlHttpRequest is most convenient, there were other methods of doing this before XmlHttpRequest such as

- loading a 1 pixel image and sending data in the image's cookie

- loading server data through a tiny frame which contained XML or javascipt data

- Using a java applet to fetch the data on behalf of javascript

_Microsoft, because it invented the XMLHTTP object and without Google standing forth on this aspect, you wouldnt have been able to see any of the above mentioned miracles imparted to the web today_

That's the most badly constructed sentence I hope to read all day.