Remember that entry I wrote a few days ago? I called it Smarter and in it I revelled at the sheer brilliance of some of the new widgets and whatsits hitting the web. Well, Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path fame has shed some light on a relatively new technique that is being incorporated by most of the sites I mentioned.

It's called Ajax and it's more of a collaboration of common technologies than a new one. Using XHTML and CSS, the Document Object Model, XML and XSLT, XMLHttpRequest, and JavaScript, server requests can be more efficient, page rendering more logical, and the user experience something akin to what I feel when I use A9, Flickr or Google Suggest (all of which incorporate Ajax).

"Instead of loading a webpage, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine written in JavaScript and usually tucked away in a hidden frame. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user's behalf. The Ajax engine allows the user's interaction with the application to happen asynchronously, independent of communication with the server. So the user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something."

This guy is smart.

Read what he has to say.