Rails render works in console but does not load page - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

My goal is to render html from an AJAX call. Changing the dataType to 'html' in my AJAX call seemed to work in that on my console it happily claims that the render was successful:
Rendered admin/articles/show.html.erb within layouts/application (108.1ms)
Completed 200 OK in 185ms (Views: 112.6ms | ActiveRecord: 2.8ms)
but the page does not change.
Here's some code:
View:
<span id='show' class="ui-icon ui-icon-extlink" article_id=<%=article.ID %> onmouseover="this.style.cursor='pointer'"></span>
jquery:
$('#show').live("click",function(evt){
evt.preventDefault();
var article_id=$(this).attr("article_id");
$.ajax({
success : null,
type : 'GET',
url : '/admin/articles/show',
dataType : 'html',
data: {
id: article_id
},
});
});
and my controller:
def show
#article = Article.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.xml { render :xml => #article }
end
end
routes.rb
match 'articles/show' => 'articles#show', :via => :get
I know it's an odd request to want to render html from AJAX but it's the easiest way that I can think to have a clickable link contained in a span tag.
Using Rails 3.0.1, Ruby 1.9.2 and JQuery

Answer 1

usually ajax request ha js type,if you can change type to js these changes will works
controller
def show
#article = Article.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.js
format.xml { render :xml => #article }
end
end
then in app/views/articles/show.js.erb write javascript code to update page content like
$("#yourDiv1").html("blah blah");
$("#yourDiv2").html("whatever");
and following approach will work for both html and JS
$.ajax({
success : null,
type : 'GET',
url : '/admin/articles/show',
dataType : 'html',
data: {
id: article_id
},
}).done(function( html ) {
$("#yourDIv").html(html);
});