XML with Padding | January 27th, 2006
So Yahoo! supports the very nice JSONP data formatting for returning JSON (with a callback) to the browser - this of course enables cross domain browser mash-ups with no server proxy.
My question to Yahoo! is then why not support XMLP? I want to be able to get my search results in XML so that I can apply some XSLT and insert the resulting XHTML into my AJAX application. I am hoping that the “callback” parameter on their REST interface will soon be available for XML. It would be essentially the exact same as that for JSON and would call the callback after the XML data is loaded into an XML document in a cross-browser fashion. While that last point would be the most sticky it is, as everyone knows, dead simple to make cross browser XML documents 
Please Yahoo! give me my mash-up’able XML!
If you want to make it really good then feel free to either return terse element names (like “e” rather than “searchResult” or something like that) or add some meta-data to describe the XML (some call it a schema but I am not sure JSON people will be familiar with it 
) so that people will not complain about how “bloated” the XML is. For example:
<metadata>
<searchResult encoding=”e” />
</metadata>
<data>
<e>Search result 1</e>
<e>Search result 2</e>
<e>Search result 3</e>
<e>Search result 4</e>
<e>Search result 5</e>
<e>Search result 6</e>
</data>
Come on Yahoo! help me help you!
April 9th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
[...] On a post I made a few days back I proposed a way to do cross domain AJaX using XML rather than the commonly used JSON. It is essentially an extension of the idea of JSONP (JSON with Padding). Since I generally find myself working with XML more often than JSON I decided to create the equivalent for XML based applications. I have not extensively tested it but did try it on IE6 and FF1.5 on Win2K server. [...]
January 8th, 2007 at 3:03 am
[...] The other important points are really in direct response to Dare Obsanjo’s posts from last week: Browser Security Model and Browser Programming Model. First of all, Dare suggests that one reason for JSON being so popular is due to cross-domain JSON (also called JSONP or JSON with Padding). Ignoring the data format, this pattern is applicable to any kind of data, including XML (XML with Padding is equally valid). There is no reason that Yahoo! could not provide a cross-domain XML API along side a cross-domain JSON API. In fact, I urge people to email everyone they know over at Yahoo! to do so for all their properties such as del.icio.us. [...]