Sounds like Ajax lets us get back to those awful painful messy problems, like this, that GUI programmers used to have to waste so much time on, before web applications came along and simplified everything :-)



I'd suppose you'd want to put keys in a buffer and start a timer. If more keys come in before the timer expires, you add them to the buffer and reset the timer. If the timer expires (OR if the buffer gets full), only then do you send the data.



I have no idea how to do this in javascript, and I'm sure it's horribly ugly and messy and impossible to test and debug. And I don't know if any of the available Ajax libraries have tools to help with this....... (a big reason why I've sort of ignored Ajax so far :-)