As I am now getting things nearly functional (the AJAX part is working except for the UTF8 encoding issues that still remain), I have been able to extract the JavaScript created by CGI::Ajax and save it to a separate file, then gzip it for proper size comparison. It amounts to 2.1 KB. That is at least 14 times smaller than the jQuery option you mentioned. Given the thousands of connections which this project will require, that works out to more than a negligible bandwidth savings.