Hereby my apologies to everyone who had to waste his time by writing a rant, because the Web APIs WG and probably Dean and myself in particular (being the editors) didn’t get the attribution right. This was fixed quite soon after the first draft was released in the editor’s draft of XMLHttpRequest, but you can’t change the published version. Sjoerd just told me we made the frontpage of XML.com with that. Great! The current draft reads: Special thanks also to the Microsoft employees who first implemented the
XMLHttpRequest interface, which was first widely deployed by the Windows Internet Explorer browser.
Special thanks also to the Microsoft employees who first implemented the XMLHttpRequest interface
Indeed.
"which was first widely deployed by the Windows Internet Explorer browser"
Given the first part of the sentence, this shouldn´t really come as too much as a surprise - why not state that it took many years to actually take off properly? Eh, Oreilly? (/rant)