There are people out there that are aware of the current pitfalls and limitations of AJAX, and use it in an appropriate way. My site worked fine without AJAX, albeit with the overhead of unnecessary page reloads and having to send and receive superfluous data with each request/response. Now I've used AJAX techniques in certain places to enhance the functionality and it works fine, not least of all the transactions to and from the server are now smaller and quicker and there is no need for a complete page refresh.