AJAX and NS_ERROR_DOM_BAD_URI error

Question

I have been having the following problem, i think it's probably due to the fact that my approach may be misguided, but hopefully with your help i can sort this out!

Basically, for my site i have a search provider (who has been paid, so i am not breaking any terms of use). When the search form is subbmitted i am directed to their domain where the results are displayed.

Whilst i can customise the look of the returned results, there is only so far i can take this, and will never get it fitting in fully with the look and feel of my site.

So, i thought, instead of doing the regular GET via the form, i would do an AJAXified GET and then inject the returned response into a div on the page - allowing me to maintain the look and feel and never leave our domain.

This works fine in IE but in firefox i get "text/html (NS_ERROR_DOM_BAD_URI)" as an error. Having done some research i have discovered this is due to the AJAX request hitting a site outside of our domain.

Thus, is there a better approach i can take to achieve the same effect? or is there a way i can get firefox and my AJAX request to play nice? What is really strange is that if i observe the request in the HttpFox (a neat FF add on), it reports the above error, but looking at the content returned it is all there as expected - so why can't i access it!!

I would really like to get this to work as it is a whole lot simpler than rewriting all our CSS and stuff to get their results page looking almost like our site. Any help in this area would be much appreciated.

Solution

You'll have to use JSONP to do cross domain as far as I know - it's a security exception in AJAX. JQuery handles it nicely but, you will have to have the server reply modified to match it.

I have done an OSS project for Social Actions that does this using a PHP proxy. You can look at it here: http://os.adamaltemus.com/social-actions/