He mentioned chunk streaming text in an iframe I think as a joke, but I remember actually implementing a decent chat web app exactly like that years ago in the IE5 days or so.
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A company I worked for in 2001 used chucked streaming to provide search results. The search results were collected by performing live searches in parallel (server side) with multiple partners and then aggregated into a single stream of chunked content. Basically the HTTP connection was kept open until all searches were complete, which would take a few minutes. The results were pushed incrementally to the browser as soon as they were available
This worked surprisingly well. They started with almost pure HTML with the results split into multiple tables to produce what looked like a single table of results. The only drawback was that the columns needed fixed width so that they would align properly.
After a while they switched to a Javascript based solution with dynamic filters. They used the same backend streaming engine to output chunks of Javascript code inside <script>-tags, which called a global "addResult(...)" method to update the state. If the search was cached, it would first render HTML code server side, which was then "hydrated" by the javascript code if needed.
Later it was replaced with a standard XHR polling mechanism.
It is interesting to look back at what we had to do that is trivial with today's technology.
Yeah you basically never close the response, right? Just keep appending! Chat is a good use case for it.
Maybe with CSS these days you could make only the last child of a div visible, and have constant updates with no need for JS.
Anyway. I quite like this idea of no JS. I know he said it would be evil to serve ads using MJPEG, but I'd probably prefer it if my page had less JS on it.
> Anyway. I quite like this idea of no JS. I know he said it would be evil to serve ads using MJPEG, but I'd probably prefer it if my page had less JS on it.
Honestly I don't see how it's more evil, just because it doesn't use JS surely doesn't mean uBlock and such can't still block it? To be evil all ads full stop would have to be evil. As you say, I would much prefer this to ads that use JavaScript. If you can still show me ads on your news article when I haven't got JS enabled I'm not going to be too bothered, because hopefully everything should load plenty fast. It also means the rest of the site can load while the ads are loading.
Yep, I've done that to send the status of a large upload, that must have been around 2008 or so.
We had a progress bar that would show the upload percentage, then the unzipping, then the virus scan on the server, then it would be marked as done.
At FriendFeed, when we first introduced real-time comments and likes (pretty sure we were the first social network to do this), we did it with long-polling via an iFrame because web sockets did not exist. It actually worked pretty well!
https://www.ft.com/content/87b8107e-9c6d-3d3f-a60d-3e4f6315d...