Datasheet

FIGURE 1.31

Using an Ajax Rolodex

This Rolodex works using CSS to display its data. Each time you click a person’s name, the applica-

tion fetches that person’s data from the server, puts together a Rolodex card, and then displays that

card using CSS to modify the Web page on the fly.

That’s the way it works: You display the results of your actions in a Web page at run time. You

don’t cause a page refresh to happen.

Another example that shows how to modify a Web page is located at

http://digg.com/spy,

which is shown in Figure 1.32. This site presents news articles that users vote on in real time, and

constantly updates itself using a combination of CSS and dynamic HTML. The list of articles you

see displayed keeps changing as users vote on them, and each article gets a thumbs-up or thumbs-

down icon. It’s all done using Ajax to fetch data from the server without causing a page refresh.

Essential Ajax

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