get url:xml why external url does not work

Question

I am trying to grab information from an external xml with the following code. It only worked when I uploaded same file to my servers. Why cant I grab information from an external url?

<script language="javascript">
// This script uses jQuery to retrieve the news XML file and display the contents
$(document).ready(function(){

 $.ajax({
     type: "GET",
  url: "www.simplyprofound.com/samples/xml_jquery/sample.xml",
  dataType: "xml",
  success: function(xml) {
   $(xml).find('item').each(function(){
    var title = $(this).find('title').text();
    var source = $(this).find('source').text();
    var description = $(this).find('description').text();
    $('<div class="news_title"></div>').html(title).appendTo('#news_wrap');
    $('<div class="news_source"></div>').html(source).appendTo('#news_wrap');
    $('<div class="news_description"></div>').html(description).appendTo('#news_wrap');
   });
  }
 });
});
</script>

Answer 1

Put http:// in front of your URL, like so:

http://www.simplyprofound.com/samples/xml_jquery/sample.xml

Otherwise, it tries to find a file named sample.xml in a directory of your site named /www.simplyprofound.com/samples/xml_jquery/.

Answer 2

I believe it's because the jQuery AJAX stuff uses XMLHTTPRequest (as most do), which doesn't allow you to make requests to domains that aren't your own (as a security feature).

Answer 3

You cant do x-domain xhr requests. You can either use a server side proxy on your side, so you would make the ajax call to a page on your server which would make the remote request and respond the file contents or if the endpoint supports json-p you can set the dataType to jsonp and request the data.