Refreshing DIV content with AJAX

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is a keystone of Web 2.0 and is very useful in many aspects, because it offers the possibility to change the structure of the page (DOM). For instance, it makes possible refreshing a part of a website instead of having to use the classic page reload, which requests again the whole page from the server even when the updated parts are minimal (much slower and of course consumes more bandwidth; therefore making the visitor experience worse).

If you know what a HTML <div> tag is and how to use it, with the help of AJAX refreshing a section of your website is possible. The section which will be refreshed is within a DIV; the rest of the HTML outside the DIV will not be refreshed.

To show you how to do so, I prepared an example with the code required for this purpose. But if you’re new to AJAX and would like to know how the code works, I recommend you to take a look at first at w3schools AJAX tutorial.

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