rest/ahah
AHAH: Asychronous HTML over HTTP
AHAH is a very simple technique for dynamically updating web pages using JavaScript. It involves using XMLHTTPRequest to retrieve (X)HTML fragments which are then inserted directly into the web page, whence they can be styled using CSS.
Contributors
Relation to AJAX
AHAH is intended to be a much simpler way to do web development than what is commonly called AJAX: "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML." Strictly speaking, AHAH can be considered a subset of AJAX, since (X)HTML is just a special kind of XML However, it is a subset with some very useful properties:
Source Code
History
AHAH as a formal technique appears to have been introduced by Kevin Marks on May 12, 2005 under the name JAH: "Just Asynchronous HTML", where it was also used in a simple example. The term "AHAH" was proposed by Ernest Prabhakar during the 2005 Web 2.0 conference, and later adopted as part of the REST-Enabled XHTML (REX) microformat for web services.
David Hansson had independently discovered the exact same concept, and in fact had already submitted an abstract about it for O'Reilly's 2006 E-Tech conference when he encountered the work done by Marks and Prabhakar. He had not however named the technique, and quickly agreed to adopt the AHAH moniker. The same concept has no doubt been independently discovered by many other individuals, but these three are probably the first to make a sustained attempt to promote it as a formal technique.
Implementations
- There is some talk of directly supporting AHAH in Ruby on Rails using 'partials.'