Ajax to do more stuff?

Tim Bray over at Ongoing talks about AJAX Performance. His point being, that we should use AJAX to offload heavy computation from the web-server to the users browser.

I suspect there’s a huge system-wide optimization waiting out there for us to grab, by pushing as much of the templating and page generation work out there onto the clients. In particular, when you’re personalizing a page, assign all the work you can to the personal computer sitting in front of the person in question.

That sounds like a really interesting idea. In my Rails applications I see a lot of time spent in the renderer, not in the database portion. Maybe something to look at, when I get back from the mountains…