HTTP access control (CORS)

See HTTP access control (CORS).

A resource makes a cross-origin HTTP request when it requests a resource from a different domain than the one which the first resource itself serves. For example, an HTML page served from http://domain-a.com makes an <img> src request for http://domain-b.com/image.jpg. Many pages on the web today load resources like CSS stylesheets, images and scripts from separate domains.

For security reasons, browsers restrict cross-origin HTTP requests initiated from within scripts. For example, XMLHttpRequest follows the same-origin policy. So, a web application using XMLHttpRequest could only make HTTP requests to its own domain. To improve web applications, developers asked browser vendors to allow XMLHttpRequest to make cross-domain requests.