Ajax Patterns and Best Practices

Chapter 3. Content Chunking Pattern

Intent

The Content Chunking pattern makes it possible to incrementally build an HTML page, thereby allowing the logic of an individual HTML page to be distributed and the user to decide the time and logic of the content that is loaded.

Motivation

Originally, when the Web was in its infancy, HTML content designers created documents that were incomplete. The incomplete pages were made complete by using document links. The completeness of a document was the sum of the pages in the document tree.

Think of it as follows: instead of creating a book in which you follow through the content in a sequential manner, for the Web you would paste materials together like a bunch of magazine articles. But unlike a magazine that ...