Sams Teach Yourself HTML, CSS & JavaScript Web Publishing in One Hour a Day

ptg16476052

AJAX and jQuery 523

For a real application, instead of this simple page, you’d have a more robust service that
could return lots of information about every country in South America on demand. This
sample page illustrates the concept without requiring knowledge of server-side program-
ming.

Now that the raw information is in place to be used on the page, I’ll explain how the page
works. When a link is clicked, the information is retrieved from countries.html and dis-
played on the initial page, as shown in Figure 18.17.

First, let’s look at the two links:

Uruguay

Paraguay

They almost look like regular links. The one difference is that I’ve included a space
between the filename and the anchor in the URL. That’s because it’s not really an anchor;
it’s the ID of a