An Interlude - Ajax Tutorial

After the ranting in the previous entries, I think its time to take a break from the philosophical side and get our hands dirty. I am going to put together a tutorial which explains how to you Ajax. I plan to start from the simplest tricks all the way to the most complex ones.
But one step at a time.

To begin with I will demonstrate what I have been discussing - the "world-wide-wait" syndrome everyone is so familiar with. In this demo I have two pages. The first one is a traditional template based web site and the second one is Ajax based. Both of them provide you the exact same information (reviews on 7 latest car models) but you can see thedifference for yourself!

I call the first one Click-and-Wait. You click each link and you wait for the page to load up. The second one, in contrast, is Wait-and-Click-click-click. The page loads the data which is packaged in an XML file and after the initial wait, you are free to click asfast as you can!

Page 1 - The typical Click and Wait website

Page 2 - Same information, but with nifty ajax at work.

Next: I will dissect this demo and explain how it all works. This will be useful to anyone who wants to learn the nuts and bolts of ajax orwants to implement their own ajax code.