Recently Garret Smith of Adaptive Path made a good case for using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and coined the acronym "AJAX" to represent that notion. It is similar to the Remote IFrame technique in that things are handled on the client side, but as we shall see differs in significant ways. That article reminded me of our earlier work on this front and sparked my interest in Ajax. Part of that interest is in writing this article and sharing my efforts with the development community. To my way of thinking, Ajax is more a natural progression from an existing set of techniques as opposed to being something completely brand new. Yet within that progression, things are markedly different than in previous years in a couple of key areas: It provides a mechanism to mix and match xml with xhtml. It significantly reduces having to continually fetch things from a server (remote IFrame scripting is reasonably comparable here). It overcomes some speed bottlenecks that traditional Web development has fallen prey too. In most instances an Ajax based site will load quicker than a comparable traditional Web site. When done well, it significantly reduces initial load times.