Transferring Dom/value Pairs

let me say up front that my experience with JavaScript and "Ajax"
interactions has been horrific. There are weeks I will never get back
because of it. Whenever I encounter something so horrific that it
makes me blank my memories of the event, I find myself going back and
trying to take different approaches to understanding what happens.

This current round of experiments involves sending and receiving what
is effectively an associative array. That is, I want to send dom names
and the associated values via XMLHttpRequest calls and on return, get a
set of dom value pairs and push them back into the current environment
in the browser.

what I need to figure out how to do is associate a series of DOM's with
a button, extract the information when the button is pressed, and then
present the entire array to a CGI. On return, I would need to take the
same array from the CGI and transfer the contents into the specified
DOM's

if this is not practical, tell me so and I go do something else which
is probably more fun. If it is practical and has been implemented in
some toolkit, fantastic. It saves me some pain. If it hasn't been
implemented, well, there goes the more hours that I will never get
back.