the single one that most traditional Web pages use and consequently speeds things up considerably. More on that later as we go through this tutorial.

In this tutorial I will be using xmlhttprequest to represent both versions: the xmlhttprequest object itself, (supported by, Firefox, Opera 8, Safari and later Mozilla builds and the Microsoft equivalent activeX object. I do this for the sake of brevity rather than anything else.

We are going to walk through the basics of Ajax and culminate in the building of a little Ajax powered Fading Image Gallery application. In this way it hoped that a deeper appreciation for what Ajax is capable of is conveyed. It also should be noted that in another upcoming tutorial, we will tweak that Image Gallery widget and add some form processing capabilities to it, add some more FX, get a few glitches out of that system and so on.