ordering data without a total refresh

Lets say that I have a table... <TABLE><TR> <TD>name |</TD><TD> place</TD><TD> | number</TD><TD> |etc</TD> </TR></TABLE> name, place...etc are all links. What I want to do, is when I click on the 'name' for example, I get the stuff ordered by name. This can be done easily, but what if I didn`t want the whole page to be refreshed? What if i wanted only the needed data to be taken from database again in a right order? I`ve seen something like that somewhere, but how could I do it? XML? but then again, how? thanks Siim