What is the 'best practice' when returning dynamic data for a table (server side sorting, filtering etc from a db) ? Do you return just the data in json, and repeatedly clone a row element, replacing the values in each row (thus decreasing the size of the ajax call, but increasing the client side processing), or return the full html, and replace with .html or .append? Or is there another method I'm missing?

This is a frequent situation in my app, and in some cases a bottleneck, and I am unsure if what I am doing is the best solution. Currently, I return the row html and use a single .append call, after emptying all the rows except the header.