AJAX is not about XML anymore. A lot of people use XHRs with JSON. AJAX now refers to the dynamic phenomenon. So their name is indeed appropriate. Evolution.
Not completely true... The X in XHR stands for XML, as that's what it parses natively [1], whereas parsing JSON wasn't native until relatively recently. JavaScript had Java's syntax. Not sure about hamsters and ham...
From your link: "responseXML was introduced in Windows Internet Explorer 7" - in October 2006. XHR was first shipped with Internet Explorer 5 - in March 1999!
JavaScript's syntax is less like Java's than any other popular language that idiomatically uses curly-braces to delimit blocks.
Hamster starts with Ham, but they are as unrelated as two things can be that exist in the same broad category (flesh).
Yeah... giving them the benefit of the doubt, that's misleading wording: XMLHttpRequest is an object in the JS namespace as of IE7. Before that, you needed to import an ActiveX Object, which has supported requestXML since MSXML 2.0 (that's IE5). See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms757066(VS.85).aspx
No, it's more like if the SAT was partially named for the type of soil underlying the foundation of the building occupied by the school where the tests were first given, and then had its hype cycle fueled by shittily-paraphrased press releases from garden supply distributors.
