Differential AJAX updates for HTML table?
Without thinking of deltas:
You can use JSON quite easily to do this sort of thing.  You can roll out your own compressed format, too.
I think compressing the data using gzip would help a lot.  Most browsers nowadays support it, and it will greatly reduce the size of your responses.
I have a game that's based on a 25x20 HTML table (the game board). Every 3 seconds the user can "move," which sends an AJAX request to the server, at which time the server rerenders the entire HTML table and sends it to the user.
This was easy to write, but it wastes a lot of bandwidth. Are there any libraries, client (preferably jquery) or server-side, that help send differential instead of full updates for large tables? Usually only 5-10 tiles change on a given reload, so I feel like I could cut bandwidth use by an order of magnitude by sending just those tiles instead of all 500 every 3 seconds.
I'm also open to "you idiot, why are you using HTML tables"-type comments if you can suggest a better alternative. For example are there any CSS/DOM manipulation techniques I should be considering instead of using an HTML table? Should I use a table but give each td coordinates for an id (like "12x08") and then use jquery to replace cells by id?
A clarification: the tiles are text, not images.