function createRequestObject()
{
	var ro;
	var browser = navigator.appName;

	if(browser == "Microsoft Internet Explorer") 
	{
		// on IE, we have to use ActiveX
		ro = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
	}
	else
	{
		// on every other browser, we can directly create a new XMLHttpRequest object
		ro = new XMLHttpRequest();
	}
	return ro;
}

var http = createRequestObject();

// this function should be called for user input
// it opens up a php page with a querystring of 'action'
// this function could probably be adapted to POST
function sndReq(urlAction)
{
	http.open("get", urlAction);
	http.onreadystatechange = handleResponse;
	http.send(null);
}

// the response in this case is formatted as follows:
// object|text
// where object is the id of the HTML element we are going to update
// and text is what it will be updated to
// this could obviously work a lot better with some XML
function handleResponse()
{
	if(http.readyState == 4) 
	{
		var response = http.responseText;
		var update = new Array();
		if(response.indexOf('|' != -1))
		{
			update = response.split("|");
			document.getElementById(update[0]).innerHTML = update[1];
		}
	}
}