AJAX is one of the newer buzz words floating around these days and sites with fancy AJAX scripts for you to cut and paste are springing up all the time. So what are the basics of AJAX? How does it work? And is it easy to write your own simple AJAX scripts?
Follow this short AJAX guide and with nothing more than a text editor and a browser you'll grasp the basics in no time.

In Part 2. of this AJAX guide we create a very simple XML text file and run through the steps to get the data to update into a web page without refreshing the page.

Using responseXML and the DOM instead of responseText
So far we have been looking at AJAX using an XML file, however we have really only been treating the XML file as any other text file. This could have been a .txt .htm or some text generated by a server side scripting engine (PHP, ASP etc.)