Sounds like a great idea and, according to the timestamp, was proposed in 2006 already.

Well, considering the incredible pace at which W3C and browser vendors operate I'm definately looking forward to see this implemented within the next 15 years or less!

The example he uses throughout is pirate.net attacking penzance.org. Lovely Gilbert and Sullivan reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance

Good idea, bad implementation.

XmlHttpRequest was as bad a name choice as JsonRequest.

There should be a data agnostic API used to communicate any kind of data across web sites, with security in mind.

Name it HttpRequest, period.

WebSocket is a step in the right direction although afaik doesn't deal with different domains.

Why? That would just confuse people.

No, we shouldn't stuff browsers with an object for every data type in existance: XmlRequest, AsciiRequest, CSVRequest, EDIRequest, ASNRequest, TXTRequest, etc.

Just one that allows same/remote connections and a few methods: get the data and check for errors.

The parsing and validation should be done on the client after the data has been received and for that we have xml parsers and json parsers.

The data transfer should have nothing to do with its format or content.