3 ms·
The implementation detail with the infinite document size is surprising! I remember the HTML chatrooms from that era on other sites, and IIRC a lot of them wor
by paultopia 3y ago
The implementation detail with the infinite document size is surprising! I remember the HTML chatrooms from that era on other sites, and IIRC a lot of them worked via a meta tag that just told the browser to refresh the page every so often.
I still have friends whom I met in chatrooms from around 1996ish using that technique.
- nness 3y agoI believe the same technique was used with early "live webcams" too — utilising a quirk (or maybe it was an intentional feature) of the GIF format allowed the server to just "send more frames." I seem to recall GIF even allowed you to change the palette mid-animation for this purpose (although would love to know if there was any other purpose.) Had the side-effect of making it impossible to download the GIF as the server would never close the connection.