You're trying to make the browsers do something they weren't designed to and you're attempting to do it in an admirable (but roundabout and inefficient) way.

You're trying to recreate IRC (I think; it's the closest thing to the end result of properly working 'streaming' RinkChat that I know of) with HTML, CGI and the POST command. It should, can and does work.

However, browsers were meant to display static pages, and then pages with interactive/dynamic content (Java, CSS, DHTML and Flash to name a few). They weren't meant to be IRC; IRC already exists.


Does RinkChat fit in with the HTML 4.0 spec? I haven't read it lately but I don't think it was designed to support something like RinkChat. Theoretically, you could make something like RinkChat (and you have! No small feat) but it was not designed with RinkChat in mind.

Not that I'm some browser apologist. Even making table layouts gets difficult cross-browser and the lack of adherance to standards (by the author of the HTML document and the programmers of the browser) only makes this worse.

Web standards pretty much suck anyways. HTML is like x86-- it's doing something that the original designers never thought it would have or could have and they would've balked at had you mentioned the idea to them.

You could move RinkChat to IRC but that would destory part of RinkChat's charm and no one wants that to happen.



Overall, writing for the Web sucks because the Web is a bloody mess fraught with politics and other such things. I stop fiddling with my site when it looks good (IE refuses to recognize the 'middle' property of vertical alignment of table cell contents; Mozilla doesn't have this problem. However, IE allows me to set the margins of my page while Mozilla doesn't. Blah).