[tbsdy]

100% agreed! Currently I'm trying to get access to a iTSM tool that uses HTTP as it's transport mechanism. It uses ActiveX controls to gather data into a grid-like mechanism.

As I particularly hate ActiveX, I have started reverse engineering what these controls do. So far so good, except that the format used for the data that the controls receive is an application/octet-stream binary format.

Now I've worked out how the format works, and by using JDataView I'm parsing the format. But you know what? Internet Explorer takes null characters in strings and will not go any further, even though ECMA-262 states that:

"The String type is the set of all finite ordered sequences of zero or more 16-bit unsigned integer values... All operations on Strings (except as otherwise stated) treat them as sequences of undifferentiated 16-bit unsigned integers; they do not ensure the resulting String is in normalised form, nor do they ensure language-sensitive results."

If they had passed the data back in something saner like JSON, or heck even XML!, then things would have be fine. As it is, I've decided to skip Internet Explorer as it's just not worth my time to get around this issue, and every other browser works fine with JDataView.