Wacka-wacka DOOOO!
Today's brain teaser is AJAX + PHP + Javascript + XML + MySQL ... and there may be some others I've left out CSS, XHTML, stuff like that.
Nevertheless, we will prevail. Links to follow.^
Nothing specific to the MySQL side of this, for now.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines the HTML Document Object Module (DOM) as a standard. The DOM is used as a standardized way to programmatically access the content of HTML [and XML – we're only concerned with the HTML, here] documents.
Languages commonly used to access and modify the content of a DOM document instance [an instance of a DOM-conformant document] are Java and Javascript.
In this case, we are interested in accessing and modifying the content (data and meta-data) of an HTML document using Javascript to manipulate HTML elements using DOM-defined methods.