Ajax applications (Asynchronous Javascript + XML) are the hottest topic du jour, due to Jesse Jame Garrett’s essay on the topic a few days ago.

(Offtopic: I hate being scooped by Slashdot! I noticed the Ajax article a few days ago off a link at Peterme, and was going to blog it …. but … Slashdot beat me to it.)

In any case, Jeffrey Veen, another Adaptive Path associate, mentioned that 1976Design.com had a pretty neat implementation of this: the live search results it offers.

Cool - but the same rules apply: validate your input.

While doing things the old fashioned way might have brought up a standard error page, this Ajax implementation sort of hung out the dirty laundry in public, when I fed it something indigestible (an apostrophe):