AJAX where I'm sitting from is a kind of grand compromise. You break things in the “document” of the cross-industry website model so that your site can act like an “application”. If the site makes good use of AJAx, they will break the document model thinly, which will add something useful to the application. The "vote" link is not really a link, but it gives you cool animation and updates the status of a question asynchronously.
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