In our development environment, we have fully adopted the use of jQuery for ajax calls to .net web services. However, I think our developers might be taking it too far. For example, on an initial page load, very little is actually rendered on the page. Basically, the page layout and some divs where the data will be loaded are the only things rendered. Then ajax calls are made on document ready to load the page with the data driven content. But, they are even using this method for content that is needed from the very beginning and sometimes not even updated dynamically.
My question is, why not load this content using the tradional _load methods in the code behind of the .net page? I can see where you might not want to do this if it is alot of data. The page appears to load faster if you only load a shell and then go get the data. But in the case of a short list/table of data, why make the user wait for the page to load and then another network call to get the data? This small set of data will most likely take the server no time to render to the html, and the impact on the size of the download would be very small.
Opinions?