does it reload the entire page or does it have the intelligence to only send the necessary js to update the needed parts of the page that have changed?
if it does the latter that would be a god send, however im probably being dreamful. it probably returns the entire view without any regard, right?
edit: answer seems to be no, everything is returned.
edit added:
do you think it would be difficult to write a framework where mvc compares last html it output to the current html we want to output, and instead of sending the entire html, figure out what has changed and generate js code that will do the updating as compared to previous html? (presuming nothing was manually changed on the client using js)… maybe an idea for a codeplex project? or maybe something like this exists?
Frankly, what happens on the client side is of no concern to MVC. 🙂 It does not know whether the call was made by the browser engine or the ECMA script.
And since you are asking about Ajax call, the responsibility with dealing with the result falls onto your script (or whatever JS framework you’re using).