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Comment by jeresig | Hacker News Reader

"capable of handling HTTP headers" - can you expand on this a bit?

Right now you can set HTTP headers in jQuery like so:

    $.ajax({
      beforeSend: function(xhr){
        xhr.setRequestHeader("Accept","application/json");
      },
      ... other options ...
    });

More info: http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/jQuery.ajax#options

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I'd like it that if the server sent back Content-type: application/json then jquery would automatically put it in json, and not require dataType: 'json'.

And it would really be nice if the "simple" ajax functions also allowed doing something if there was an error.

That is a pretty niche feature, I personally wouldn't do something like that.

Check out getResponseHeader() if you are so inclined.

As for the errors, there are many ways to check for "ajax" errors, for one thing you can check the status or statusText property.

Niche? I guess you don't use json. jquery already autodetects xml, why not json too? It's not even hard - it's right in the content type.

I know how to detect errors, that was hardly my point. I was suggesting an improvement, not tech support.

You don't have to eval xml.

You don't have to eval JSON.

http://www.json.org/js.html

http://www.json.org/json2.js

// In the third stage we use the eval function to compile the text into a

// JavaScript structure. The '{' operator is subject to a syntactic ambiguity

// in JavaScript: it can begin a block or an object literal. We wrap the text

// in parens to eliminate the ambiguity.

http://www.json.org/json_parse.js

// This is a function that can parse a JSON text, producing a JavaScript

// data structure. It is a simple, recursive descent parser. It does not use

// eval or regular expressions, so it can be used as a model for implementing

// a JSON parser in other languages.

Yes, but even better would be to use jQuery's excellent JSONP method.

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