I’m a bit embarrassed here because I am trying to get content remotely, by using the client’s browser and not the server. But I have specifications which make it look impossible to me, I literally spent all day on it with no success.
- The data I need to fetch is on a distant server.
- I don’t own this server (I can’t do any modification to it).
- It’s a string, and I need to get it and pass it to PHP.
- It must be the client’s (user browsing the website) browser that actually gets the data (it needs to be it’s IP, and not the servers).
And, with the cross-domain policy I don’t seem to be able to get around it. I already knew about it, still tried a simple Ajax query, which failed. Then I though ‘why not use iFrames’, but the same limitation seems to apply to them too. I then read about using YQL (http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/) but I noticed the server I was trying to reach blocked YQL’s user-agent making it impossible to use this technique.
So, that’s all I could think about or find. But I can’t believe it’s not possible to achieve such a thing, that doesn’t even look hard…
Oh, and my Javascript knowledge is very basic, this mustn’t help either.
This is one reason that the same-origin policy exists. You’re trying to have your webpage access data on a different server, without the user knowing, and without having “permission” from the other server to do so.
Without establishing a two-way trust system (ie modifying the ‘other’ server), I believe this is not possible.
Even with new xhr and crossdomain support, two-way trust is still required for the communication to work.
You could consider a fat-client approach, or try @selbie suggestion and require manual user interaction.