AJAX and Online Networking

I think AJAX will be widely adopted by websites and lead to fundamental changes. Basically it allows you to eliminate the need for switching from one page to another, and thus reduces the pauses due to page refreshing/reloading.

Instead of loading a page, your browser requests data from the server and uses it to react to the user requests.

Google Maps, notably its scrolling features, is the best example of this.

I've been wondering what would this look like for CampusActivism.org? When displaying a list of results (from browsing or searching) you could fetch 200 rows - instead of just 20, so if the user clicked on the next page (or any of the next 10 pages) it would display the results without a significant pause. You could let the client sort things in alphabetic and reverse alphabetic order.

You could go really crazy with preloading - thus if you clicked on a person, you could preload the information about their group and all their issues. I think that might be going overboard.

You could edit, delete, add a record without having to refresh a page.

What is the major problem with this? Re-writing much of my software functionality in javascript - yikes!