So in other words, you're trying to do two things at the same moment in time:
and
function onClick() {
// Attached to "#SOMETAG" and does an AJAX call ...
}
and you want to leave the HREF of SOMETAG in case they have javascript turned off?
I think the solution is when you attach to the onclick handler you should remove the href via javascript, then have the onSuccess call the href programmatically.
Because I don't see where you can have the browser spawn a new process to finish the AJAX call for you, that rather defeats the model. If I navigate away from a page (or close the tab) I don't want the browser to keep talking to the server on my behalf...