Do you Ajax JSON or HTML? [closed]

Question

What is the preferred way to do AJAX.

If it was for a search page written in PHP using Jquery for the AJAX

How would you handle the response

a) Have the response contain all the relevant html/styling

or

b) Send pure JSON and have a javascript function build the html/styling around the javascript variables.

I can see advantages to both. 'a' is obviously easier whilst 'b' is more efficient (although gzip would probably make the difference negligible).

Answer 1

I would go with the html:

• doing the conversion from json to html will make the client slower (and you don't know anything about the performance of the user's client)
• doing it in json means you have to convert twice (from your server's data structure to json, then from json to html)
• you probably do rendering to html already on the server, so you have the infrastructure
• network traffic difference will be negligable
• you can use libraries that do all the work for you (e.g. with JQuery, an ajax call that returns html just becomes jQuery('#div').load(url)).