AJAX, Old and Busted; AHAH, New Hotness?
Apparently, using AJAX to receive strictly formated XHTML has become a new “standard”. Or a new buzzword, whichever you prefer.
This is how I’ve been using AJAX anyways. Using Rails’ partials functionality, I return the XHTML I want to add to my DOM. Its way more simple than returning XML and parsing it. I never saw the reason to have that kind of overhead in development time and CPU time on the client side.