Major bump in the road with xmlhttp usage.

The responsetext method will only allow you to get the result once the readystate property is 4, which means completion. A 3 result means in progress, but here is the catch -- sometimes the URI a persistent connection, which means that unless the connection is terminated by the script or the server, readyState will always be 3 (interactive). According to the docs, I should be able grab the incomplete response from the server at this time, but apparently not.

I have seen this mentioned, for example here http://jszen.blogspot.com/2005/03/xmlhttp-and-readystate.html, but nobody has a solution that I have found.

Why is it so difficult to just grab the XML output?