> As for the recommendation to learn native JS: I suggest you instead take the route of learning jQuery. Say goodbye to cross-domain, cross-browser, xmlhttprequest issues. Selectors, manipulation, AJAX, traversing, CSS, effects, it's all there and it works really well.

This is a good example of how javascript is misunderstood and the reason he suggests doing server side js. If you really dive into javascript, you'll see its true beauty and it has nothing to do with xhr, ajax, css or DOM.