Everyone likes the AJAX client-server interaction model for websites. Using Asynchronous Javascript and XML the client browser can display a page and then issue requests for additional or updated data in the background. It’s very cool, and frameworks like Google Web Toolkit or AJAX extensions for ASP.NET have made it easier than ever to accomplish. Gone are the days when everyone worked with raw XML, the DOM, and XMLHttpRequest. Now you can write client-side code in Java or even C# and have it compiled into client-side javascript that is fully AJAX enabled. So here’s a modest proposal: now that it is so easy to do, let’s all agree to use AJAX to load banner ads. I don’t know how many times per day I end up staring at “Waiting for ads.doubleclick.net” or something similar in the status bar, while the browser page remains blank or incomplete. What would be wrong with displaying some text in the banner space and then fetching the image from the ad servers in the background?