From 8a8aa677f22b01f47a05b60ee0d265d23277801e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Gustavo Beathyate <gustavo@epiclabs.pe>
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2012 17:31:53 -0500
Subject: update AJAX guide intro [ci skip]

---
 guides/source/ajax_on_rails.textile | 16 ++++++++++++++--
 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

(limited to 'guides/source/ajax_on_rails.textile')

diff --git a/guides/source/ajax_on_rails.textile b/guides/source/ajax_on_rails.textile
index bfd007490a..301b6060da 100644
--- a/guides/source/ajax_on_rails.textile
+++ b/guides/source/ajax_on_rails.textile
@@ -10,11 +10,23 @@ endprologue.
 
 h3. Hello AJAX - a Quick Intro
 
-You'll need the basics of DOM, HTTP requests and other topics discussed here to really understand Ajax on Rails.
+AJAX is about updating parts of a web page, without reloading the page. An AJAX call happens as a
+response to an event, like when the page finished loading or when a user clicks on an element. For
+example, let say you click on a link, which would usually take you to a new page, but instead of
+doing that, an asynchronous HTTP request is made and the response is evaluated with javascript.
+That way the page is not reloaded, and new information can be dynamically included in the page.
+The way that happens is by inserting, removing or changing parts of the DOM. The DOM, or
+Document Object Model, is a convention to represent the HTML document as a set of nodes that contain
+other nodes. For example a list of names is represented as a @ul@ element node containing several
+@li@ element nodess. An AJAX call can be made to obtain a new list item to include, and append it
+inside a @li@ node to the @ul@ node.
 
 h4. Asynchronous JavaScript + XML
 
-Basic terminology, new style of creating web apps
+AJAX means Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. Asynchronous means that the page is not reloaded, the
+request made is separate from the regular page request. Javascript is used to evaluate the response
+and the XML part is a bit misleading as XML is not required, you respond to the HTTP request with
+JSON or regular HTML as well. 
 
 h4. The DOM
 
-- 
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