Actually what he meant is not supported anymore: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology#HTTP_server_...

Comet/sse/chunked transfer needs xhr to work. x-mixed-replace was würd back in the days and still is.

Edit: maybe you could also use an iframe/frame which holds a chunked connection but that will only give you text.

Chunked transfer encoding (which is indeed the underlying mechanism behind server-push) predates XHR, and AFAIK is still supported and will continue to be as long as HTTP/1.1 is still supported.

You can use a frame/iframes, but you can also just have content that is updated with multi-part MIME that doesn't cause the page layout to be redone.

x-mixed-replace Was the only mechanism that did that and chrome removed it and it is not standard and never was

I'm so confused. Was x-mixed-replace the only way to use chunked transfer encoding (which is part of the HTTP standard) or are you talking about something else entirely?

actually you can use transfer encoding chunked to stream data , but it will get appended and the page would never finish loading, that worked back than it works today but that is not useful for several reasons and wasn’t back than.

with x-mixed-replace (as the name implies x-: experimentell) you can stream the page over and over again and the browser would change to the new version. (chrome still supports that for images, cheap webcams)

Tbf without frames neither mechanism made much sense, (even back than) because it would be horrible to use with form fields.

I started to play with the web in the early 2000s where xhr/long-polling/comet(via iframes, later it used xhr onreadystatechange with chuncked encoding, without sse, which basically was created because of that) started to gain traction and x-mixed-replace was extremely niche even back than because of the limitations it had on the page

Edit: comet (streaming script tags, inside an iframe) of course worked, back then. But I never heard of an implementation before 2006 (maybe a few years earlier like 2-3)or so, would’ve been worth a Wikipedia change if you would have old entries. Also http/1.1 was 97

> actually you can use transfer encoding chunked to stream data , but it will get appended and the page would never finish loading, that worked back than it works today but that is not useful for several reasons and wasn’t back than.

Oh Server Push has all kinds of issues with it. There are lots of good reasons to prefer the newer protocols for a lot of use cases.

> Tbf without frames neither mechanism made much sense, (even back than) because it would be horrible to use with form fields.

Frames were the common way to deal with that, but I even did stuff with having a separate "named" browser window.

> Also http/1.1 was 97

IIRC there was support for it in Netscape before it was really a standard.

> IIRC there was support for it in Netscape before it was really a standard.

That is probably true, since x-mixed-replace started the whole chunked transfer encoding.

It’s probably also what really triggered the invention of comet and later xhr. Netscape was way ahead and Microsoft just pushed it out with money, integration, activex? and of course unfair advantage.

Not only x-mixed-replace. You can do out-of-order HTTP streaming by appending chunks of HTML without any JS at all, thanks to Declarative Shadow DOM: https://lamplightdev.com/blog/2024/01/10/streaming-html-out-...

Hello fellow traveler. ;-)

Nobody reads the specs anymore, and to a certain degree I can't blame them, as the protocols/standards have become quite complicated.