That might work. You could bind each child div with a custom event that would have it update itself from the passed in data. Then you could just trigger the event for that parent element.
It would be interesting to see if it's faster since it doesn't have to search for the child selectors each time. Something like Setup: When page loads $("ClassChild").bind("update", function(E){UpdateChild(this, E);}) function UpdateChild (child, E) { $(child).html(E.data[$(child).className]); } Trigger: after new data is recieved. $("#C2 .ClassChild).trigger({type:"update", E: data});