Tripbase is a travel site with an interesting Ajax interface. The site is designed to help the user find travel destinations according to their preferences and interests. For the Ajax interface, sliders are first provided allowing the user to set the type of destination they are looking for, by weighing their preferences on Nightlife, Dining, Shopping, Nature, and Attractions. After that initial selection is done, a list of top suggestions is presented on the page, and further preference customizations are given, including the dates and duration you want to travel, where you are departing from, your preferred weather, your budget, the type of trip you are looking for, the continents you are interested in, and if you want to travel in a high or low tourist season.

As you adjust the preferences on the left, the suggestions update live on the right side of the screen. In this section, it shows one photo of the suggested destination, and shows the cost per day and the population, with a link for more information.

When you click for more information on any of the suggestions, a window appears over the results with the detail information. The detail window shows the temperature, tourist season and rainfall for the period of travel indicated; has photos, and links to articles; a list of things to do, dining, nightlife, lodging, shopping, nature, and then has links to search for flights or hotels (using a different web site).

The interface is easy to use and was very responsive on my laptop using Firefox 2.

After further thought and consideration, I retract my statement that HTML should never be sent back to an AJAX request. There was a reason I made that statement, however I can’t fill you in on it yet (hint: I have to wait for a future software release). But, even with that reason, I have no issue with using HTML in an AJAX response. I wrongly applied a wise and fully correct architectural principle, which I will elaborate on in a future post, to the AJAX situation.

Hopefully at some point in the future, I can go into more detail on why I first wrongly concluded that this should never be done. Until then, rest assured, I will use whatever format fits the circumstance (JSON, HTML, XML).

Brad Neuberg has a good post that discusses further the pros and cons of returning data to your Ajax requests, with out without markup.