Why is it called XMLHttpRequest?

Question

I always wonder why this object is called like that?

The body of your request does not need to be in XML format. Also, data received from server can be fetched as JS

Answer 1

AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. In the beginning all communication was with XML (HTML is also XML-like, and XHTML is XML). JSON came later. So it is for historical reasons. (Also take a look at this wiki page)