To me it seems like the current best practice for implementing AJAX in WordPress is sending AJAX calls through admin-ajax.php (as described here for example: Smashing magazine article)
It seems so much simpler to me to just use jQuery’s load function and just grab the content from a link that way. Are there any disadvantages to this approach versus the other one?
Also, would it be safe to use jQuery load for a Woocommerce cart or checkout page – eg. instead of having the page reload to view the cart, or to go to checkout from the cart, is it safe to grab them with the load function instead? I tested it and it seems to work, but I’m concerned that it may have some sort of security issues I don’t know about – it just seems too easy and that makes me suspicious 🙂