I prefer to send updates to my web application as bitmaps. I do all the rendering of the HTML on the server to an image and just loop over the pixels and send a

I prefer to send updates to my web application as bitmaps. I do all the rendering of the HTML on the server to an image and just loop over the pixels and send a pixel if something changes from the last update. I call these updates “frames” and the client can even gracefully degrade — it can request a certain frame rate, or I can only send the luminosity value of a pixel, or randomly sample pixels to reduce detail for poor connections.