Question

some days are just like this. Ok, I’m trying to fetch some text using … well, anything that will work. I thought JQuery might be a good approach, but, for good measure, i’ll try XMLHttpRequest, too. Totally silent failure from both. I guess I just don’t understand even this tiniest, simplest case. Here it is

If I type the following into the address bar of just about any browser, I get some nice text in a window

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11.txt

Now, I want to write a little html file, on my disk, to do the same thing. Here is my attempt; I’ve gone over every letter of this file again and again, and checked with several online documents for proper JQuery & XMLHttpRequest syntax, and I cannot see anything wrong at all. But neither approach does anything at all.

Any advice?

Alice?

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<script>

  document.write('Alice?')
  $.get(
    'http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11.txt', 
    function(data) {
      document.write(data);
      alert('Load was performed.');
    });

</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
    (function GetURL()
    {
        document.write('Alice?');
        var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
        var url = 'http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11.txt';
        request.open('GET', url, false);
        request.send(null);
        document.write(request.responseText);
    })();
</script>

Answer 1

It’s a Cross-Domain Access problem (violation of Same Origin Policy). Essentially JavaScript refuses to load stuff from other servers (in newer Browsers, IE6 happily loads everything from anyone).

There are some workarounds listed in this article (Server Side proxy, IFrame, Flash/Silverlight plugin, CORS, JSONP) and another idea is EasyXDM.