I want the browser to read a stream of numeric data (let's say, comma-separated integers) from an http-url on the server.

The stream is finite, but can be quite long, and I would like to start processing the data 

in javascript (draw a html5/canvas/2d graph) incrementally as the data is received, 

without waiting for end-of-stream before start drawing,

thus avoiding to hold the complete stream in browser's RAM.

And in a fashion that works on all major browsers, of course.

But how do I read the http-stream incrementally? 

I figured this would be a quite common use-case, but still cannot easily google up a good example...

Can I do this with $.ajax() function?

If so, what event should I respond to, and how do I read data from the partial, incomplete stream that has arrived so far?