Relaxing the same-origin policy
In some circumstances the same-origin policy is too restrictive, posing problems for large websites that use multiple subdomains. Here are four techniques for relaxing it:
If two windows (or frames) contain scripts that set domain to the same value, the same-origin policy is relaxed for these two windows, and each window can interact with the other. For example, cooperating scripts in documents loaded from orders.example.com and catalog.example.com might set their document.domain properties to “example.com”, thereby making the documents appear to have the same origin and enabling each document to read properties of the other. This might not always work as the port stored in the internal representation can become marked as null. In other words example.com port 80 will become example.com port null because we update document.domain. Port null might not be treated as 80 ( depending on your browser ) and hence might fail or succeed depending on your browser.
The second technique for relaxing the same-origin policy is being standardized under the name Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. This draft standard extends HTTP with a new Origin request header and a new Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header. It allows servers to use a header to explicitly list origins that may request a file or to use a wildcard and allow a file to be requested by any site. Browsers such as Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 use this new header to allow the cross-origin HTTP requests with XMLHttpRequest that would otherwise have been forbidden by the same-origin policy.[7]
Another new technique, cross-document messaging allows a script from one page to pass textual messages to a script on another page regardless of the script origins. Calling the postMessage() method on a Window object asynchronously fires an "onmessage" event in that window, triggering any user-defined event handlers. A script in one page still cannot directly access methods or variables in the other page, but they can communicate safely through this message-passing technique.
JSONP allows a page to receive JSON data from a different domain by adding a <script> element to the page which loads a JSON response from a different domain.
The function call is the “P” of JSONP—the “padding” around the pure JSON, or according to some the “prefix”. By convention, the browser provides the name of the callback function as a named query parameter value, typically using the name jsonp or callback as the named query parameter field name, in its request to the server, e.g.,
<script type="application/javascript"
src="http://server2.example.com/Users/1234?jsonp=parseResponse">
</script>
In this example, the received payload would be:
parseResponse({"Name": "Foo", "Id": 1234, "Rank": 7});