The initial impetus for changing to AJAX for Web applications is to improve the user experience by avoiding screen refreshes and increasing the speed of interaction. Another benefit, however, is that others can take the services your application is built on and build new ones. I reported earlier on an experiment by Mike Teets with Google maps. His first prototype broke after two days because Google changed something in their implementation. This is the sort of thing that an implementation based on standard protocols would help avoid.
Although one of the basic techniques in AJAX is to use a JavaScript method called XMLHttpRequest, the applications I've looked at don't use XML at all (contrary to what the current Wikipedia entry would have you believe). I wanted to try something like Google suggest for the VIAF project and wondered if it is possible to do that in standards-based way.