A few weeks ago a few folks discovered the REST section of the microformats wiki, which discusses “how to optimally use Microformats as the encoding for REST web services”, but has grown to include broader discussions of applying microformats principles to both protocols and javascript techniques.

One of those principles could be rephrased as: Why use XML when (X)HTML will do?

Perhaps another could be rephrased: Why bother with parsing/transforming when you can just get the data in a presentable format? After all, we all know that less code is better.

AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP) is the result of applying both of those principles to the incredibly Web 2.0 buzzworthy AJAX. Strictly speaking, AHAH is simply a subset of AJAX, albeit a subset that openly de-emphasizes the X in AJAX.

AJAX Magazine provided a good overview of the advantages of AHAH over “traditional” XML-based AJAX.

Keith Devens summarized it well:

…instead of grabbing arbitrary XML and processing it on the client-side with Javascript or XSLT and inserting things into the DOM, you just grab bits of (X)HTML from the server and inject them directly into your page. So, the client side does much less logic and merely needs to say “replace the content in the element with this ID with the (X)HTML at this URI

So if you’ve been wondering what this AJAX stuff is about, take a look at AHAH, you might find it gets you 90% of the hyped user interface advantages with only about 10% of the hype (and effort for that matter). That’s the kind of 90/10 rule we like around here.

But don’t take our word for it. See what others have been saying about AJAX and AHAH.