So is there no way to access HTTP through Illustrator scripting? I've tried the one trick I found searching the forums of copying over webaccesslib.dll/netio.dll/coretypes.dll from Bridge but can't get it to work (I just get an 'Error 53: I/O error' when I try to load webaccesslib with the ExternalObject) and according to the Javascript toolkit docs Illustrator doesn't support the Socket object so I can't even write it myself.
I need to make a request to a URL to pull in some custom information but so far am at a loss as to how else to do this.