It is either really sad, or really stupid (and maybe both) that I spent most of one afternoon Googling like crazy to try and find a good partial-page-refresh script example, and the place I wound up actually finding the most useful tutorial was the last place I thought to look: w3schools.com

I've benefited greatly from the HTML and CSS tutorials W3Schools has, but for some odd reason it never crossed my mind that they might just have what I needed. I had even remarked to someone else that they also had AJAX tutorials, but it never crossed my mind to check there first.

D'oh.

Anyway, I did find a damn fine tutorial, and it even included working code! All I had to do was change a few values in the JavaScript file, point it at a PHP script I had built, and viola! Partial-page-refresh! Wooooo.

The best part is that this script seems to work on every major browser (except, of course, IE6 and lower) [EDIT:] It seems a png fix script I was trying out was what was keeping the partial-page-refresh from working. It does actually work on IE6 [/EDIT], and (even better!) behaves almost identically in every browser I can test.

Those that are curious can visit my portfolio site to see my implementation, and visit the source page to see what the original looked like.

Cheers!