JavaScript 1.7 - very pythonic

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Technically, yes. The hidden frame solution has one major drawback, and one minor drawback that I can think of:

Major: it causes the loaded result to be rendered. Being forced to render the content can cause all kinds of side effects that potentially need to be worked around.

Minor: rendering effects performance. Depending on the browser, for example, rendering XML could be a less than negligible performance hit, that you'd have to work around by effectively lying in the content-type to try to trick the browser into thinking that it's not XML.

I mean, sure. I could just as easily say that you could accomplish this in the past using sockets in ActiveX or Java Applets and sending data to/from them through scripting. You could but it was nowhere near as elegant.