Sam’s random musings

all in the — XMLHttpRequest for The Masses The idea itself is very simple. By using JavaScript, a web page can make requests to a web server and get responses in the background. The user stays on the same page, and generally has no idea that script running on the page might be requesting pages (using GET) or sending data (using POST) off to a server behind the scenes.

This is useful because it enables a web developer to change a page with data from the server after the page has already been sent to the browser. In a nutshell, this means that the page can change based on user input, without having to have pre-empted and pre-loaded that data when the page was generated.