The Wallace Line

Today [well some days ago now, this item got stuck in draft] , I came across the abbreviation AHAH to refer to the style of using AJAX to request XHTML fragments to be inserted into an HTML page. The example of XQuery and AJAX to search employee data in the wikibook used this pattern - like the gentleman in Molière's play, I had been speaking AHAH all these years without realising it .

I also happened on an item in Mark McLaren's blog in which he describes the use of this pattern to provide an incremental search of the chemical elements. He advocates using a JavaScript library such as script.aculo.us but I'm not sure this library is warranted for a simple task like this (tempting fate here I fear). For teaching purposes, minimal code is best I feel. So I implemented a version using XQuery and minimal JavaScript.

• The incremental search
• The WikiBook page

XQuery and AHAH make a pretty good pair I think.