from:http://www.openjs.com/articles/ajax/ahah_asynchronous_html_over_http/
AHAH or Asynchronous HTML over HTTP is a much simpler version of AJAX. Using AHAH approach in JavaScript you can display external XHTML pages inside your HTML page. The beauty of the script is that it is very simple - the underling code is just twenty lines!
The difference between AJAX and AHAH is the return data fomat. AJAX will load an XML file - then the developer will have to make the code that will parse the XML, extract the data and then display the results. In AHAH the approach is much simpler - the data to be fetched is XHTML - the code just has to fetch it - as the browser is already equipped to handle HTML and will display the result with no further help from the developer.
Use
For example, lets say we need to create a page with tabs - each tab will put some content in the main area - but the full thing must be dynamic - linking to another page won't do. The code of the main page will be...
The point of our exercise will be to load the contents of the javascript.html
in to the div
with the id 'content'. In the JavaScript section of the file we will declare the 'load
' function...
The code of the ahah.js
file as given below...
Now the only file left is the three content files - javascript.html
, ahah.html
and ajax.html
. The important thing to remember about this is that you should not include the standard HTML stuff like <html><body>
etc. in this page - just the content with all the HTML formatting - I am just providing the code for just the file javascript.html
here - remember that this is the whole file - nothing other than the shown data must be in that file.