General question about JavaScript and AJAX

Getting variables with AJAX

[TerryTom]

Hello all,
I've used AJAX, but am wondering whether it can be used for this:
A Javascript function which draws a shape using the HTML5 canvas tool, but getting the coordinates of the shape from an external document using AJAX.

Basically, can AJAX be used to dynamically import variables which can then be used by the rest of the Javascript code?

[daveVk]

Ajax can be used to retrieve data in any form. You could return the data as a CSV or XML and use a suitable parser to extract the data.

A more direct way is to return the data as JSON (subset of js) and eval() it to create javascript variables.

A bonus of using JSON is that the AJAX same origin can be avoided, allowing the data to from a 3rd party. The downside is that as you are not parsing the data, rouge JSON can do damage.