Best way to display data via JSON using jQuery

i am trying to find the best way to display results on my page via an Ajax call using jQuery, do you think the best way is to pass it as JSON or plain text? I have worked with ajax calls before, but not sure which is preferred over the other and for the JSON version what is the best way to read from a JSON file generated by a PHP page to display my results.

i know I would include a .each to run through it to display them all.

Something like this:

$.getJSON("http://mywebsite.com/json/get.php?cid=15",
        function(data){
          $.each(data.products, function(i,product){
            content = '<p>' + product.product_title + '</p>';
            content += '<p>' + product.product_short_description + '</p>';
            content += '<img src="' + product.product_thumbnail_src + '"/>';
            content += '<br/>';
            $(content).appendTo("#product_list");
          });
        });

Would take a json object made from a PHP array returned with the key of products. e.g:

Array('products' => Array(0 => Array('product_title' => 'Product 1',
                                     'product_short_description' => 'Product 1 is a useful product',
                                     'product_thumbnail_src' => '/images/15/1.jpg'
                                    )
                          1 => Array('product_title' => 'Product 2',
                                     'product_short_description' => 'Product 2 is a not so useful product',
                                     'product_thumbnail_src' => '/images/15/2.jpg'
                                    )
                         )
     )

To reload the list you would simply do:

$("#product_list").empty();

And then call getJSON again with new parameters.

JQuery has an inbuilt json data type for Ajax and converts the data into a object. PHP% also has inbuilt json_encode function which converts an array into json formatted string. Saves a lot of parsing, decoding effort.