AJAX and IFrames

Having had a quick look at AJAX it looks strangly familiar.
It looks like I reinvented the wheel, and mine only fitted on Fords.

Last year I implemented something very similar (although IE only).
I had some status information that I needed to keep upto date on a web page but did not want the flicker associated with a refesh. So I added a 1 pixel IFrame with its own refresh interval. It used javascript and DHTML to update it’s parent frame with the new content. This looks exactly how AJAX works only it uses a http method to call and obtain an xml document.
It is amazing how things come around.