Javascript detect which host it was loaded from - javascript

I have a Javascript library I'm working on. It can be self-hosted or run from another server. The script makes a number of AJAX calls and the preferred method is making POST requests to the same host as the including page. To allow for cross-domain calls it also supports JSONP, but this limits the amount of data that can be sent (~2K to safely accommodate most modern browsers' URL length limits).
Obviously the user including the script knows where they're getting it from and could manually select JSONP as needed, but in the interest of simplifying things, I'd like to detect, within the script itself, whether the script was loaded from the same host as the page including it or not.
I'm able to grab the script element with jQuery but doing a $('script').attr('src') is only returning a relative path (e.g. "/js/my-script.js" not "http://hostname.com/js/my-script.js") even when it's being loaded from a different host.
Is this possible and if so, how would I go about it?
Thanks in advance.

Don't use JSONP, use CORS headers.
But if you really want to do JS check, use var t = $('script')[0].outerHTML.
Effect on my page:
[20:43:34.865] "<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js" async="" type="text/javascript"></script>"

Checking location.host should do the trick.

Related

Does it make a difference how I get the user to load a script into a webpage?

I know this is very small and maybe not even worth taking the time to consider or change, but I'm still interested (also maybe this is significant for bigger files). I am injecting one of several JS scripts into my webpage, based on a HTTP get parameter: the server (PHP) looks at the parameter's value and loads the corresponding script. My question is, is there, hypothetically, any difference between doing this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo getScriptLocation($_GET["foo"]); ?>"></script>
and this:
<script type="text/javascript">
<?php echo getScript($_GET["foo"]);
</script>
?
That is, is there any perceived difference for the client based on whether I send them the script, or the script's location?
If you send the script location, the client makes an http requests to get it in the background and will execute it when it's ready. This let your page load to continue and reduces the size of the page requested.
The requested script can also be cached by the client, which makes this additional request instantaneous.
I usually prefers to pass the location. For one script it works fine. If you have tons of them, you should group the scripts in a way to reduce the number of requests, especially on mobile clients where lot of simultaneous requests are very bad.
They won't notice a difference, however if you use the src attribute the file can be cached on the users machine, giving you better performance.

Load a remote XML into a web page and access its content via JavaScript

I'd like to know if it's possible to load a remote XML file through the <script> tag, and access the content using JavaScript.
As the XML is a result of an external website (I'm using TheTVDb API), I can't load it using AJAX.
I'm looking for something like the following, if it's possible (JQuery-like syntax):
<script id="xmlload" type="text/xml" src="...">
<script type="text/javascript">
var xmlcontent = $('#xmlload').content();
// parse xmlcontent
</script>
I don't think that this is possible - you will need to use XmlHttpRequest (AJAX) to use a HTTP-based API. However, it might still be possible to actually do cross-site requests if the TheTVDb server allows this - see HTTP access control on MDN, which describes the relevant W3C specification (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).
So if you haven't done so yet, I'd recommend you just try if making an AJAX request works. Otherwise, it might be a good idea to ask the TheTVDb folks if they are so kind to implement the mentioned spec.

extracting html from cross-domains

I am using jquery to get the html from a specific domain. I know that you cant use ajax becuause of the cross-domain policy, so what i did was use $.getJSON and YQL which worked great. But this only returns the body of the html, i want to retrieve the full html document with the head tags, title tags and html tags.
Can i still do this using something else?
The same principle applies.
If you want to fetch data then it must either be:
Using JSON-P
From your own domain (as far as the browser is concerned)
You can proxy the entire document through your own domain with a little server side programming (although you should take steps to prevent yourself from being used as a URL cloaker by spammers)

load cross domain xml by Javascript

Hi
Is it possible to load an XML file from a domain that differs from scripts domain with pure javascript and without using a php/asp/jsp/... script as proxy?
Something like xmlHttpRequest but with ability to manage cross domain requests.
Thanks
You can use something called JSONP. I know the name sucks, because it's not really related to JSON. But this requires you have control over the other domain. You need to wrap your XML inside a function call, or assign it to a javascript variable:
func('<xml></xml>');
or
var myxml = '<xml></xml>';
So if your other domain returns one of these two formats, you can use the <script src="http://otherdomain/yourjsonp"></script> syntax in your html to load that data in JavaScript. It's a little hacky but a lot of people use it.
It is possible with yql! (Yahoo did it for you)
Go to this site and simple at the "select from url='xxx' " replace the xxx with your xml url. Use the url created at the text box below and do a simple xmlrequest. You won't have any cross-domain prolems

Is external JavaScript source available to scripting context inside HTML page?

When an external JavaScript file is referenced,
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.4.4.min.js"></script>
is the JavaScript source (lines of code before interpretation) available from the DOM or window context in the current HTML page? I mean by using only standard JavaScript without any installed components or tools.
I know tools like Firebug trace into external source but it's installed on the platform and likely has special ability outside the context of the browser sandbox.
Nope. There's no Javascript API for loading the true content of <script> tags. This is actually not an oversight, but rather a security feature: suppose I request the .json file that Gmail requests via AJAX to load your inbox by putting it in an external <script> tag. A JSON document is valid Javascript (granted, without side-effects), so it would run without error. Then, if I could inspect the content of the external script, I would be able to read your e-mail. (I'm almost certain that Gmail is more complex than that, but most sites are not.)
So, making up a few things about how Gmail works, here's how the attack would look:
<script id="inbox" type="text/javascript" src="http://mail.google.com/OMGYOURINBOX.json"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// Supposing a value called `externalScriptContent` existed on a script tag:
var inboxJSON = document.getElementById('inbox').externalScriptContent;
var messages = JSON.parse(inboxJSON);
for(var i in messages) {
// Do something malicious with each e-mail message
alert(messages[i].body);
}
</script>
If a script tag had the value externalScriptContent, I could just put whatever URL in for the src that I wanted, and then summon up the remote file's contents, effectively circumventing AJAX cross-origin restrictions. That'd be bad. We allow cross-origin requests for remote scripts because they are run and run only. They cannot be read.
Firebug has these permissions because Firefox extensions have the ability to inspect anything that the browser requests; normal pages, thankfully, do not.
However! Bear in mind that, if the script is on your domain, instead of writing it in <script src="…"></script> form, you can pull it up with an AJAX request then eval it to have access to the contents and still only request it once :)
You can parse the <script> tag and re-request the js file by XMLHttpRequest, it will likely be readily served from cache and with credentials of the current page. But unless both your requesting script and the script in the tag originate from the same domain, the browser will disallow this.

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