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History and Technology
Individual chat sites rise and fall in popularity pretty quickly, but the history of web chat is characterized more broadly by trends in underlying web technologies. The first chat sites featured simple interfaces made from dynamically generated HTML pages. The use of HTML allowed sites to incorporate fonts, colors, links, and images into their interfaces, giving them a more modern hypermedia feel, which was an advantage over older, but more established text-based chat services like IRC. The biggest downside to HTML chat was in its interactivity. Every message sent to an HTML chat required a form submission and subsequent page load, which meant that there was a waiting period between the time a user could send one message and the time they could begin to type the next one. Receiving messages also required frequent page reloads, and could lead to delays, page flicker, and distracting browser activity. For these reasons HTML chats have largely fallen out of use today, although some of the older HTML chat sites, [1] just as Chathouse still remain active. In 1995, Java applet technology was introduced into popular web browsers. Java's well developed network and graphical capabilities made it an ideal platform for creating chat interfaces, some of which are in use on the most popular web chat sites today. Commonly used Java chat interfaces include ParaChat, BoldChat, Chatspace, Conference Room, DigiChat, AddonChat, and PJIRC. While there are some drawbacks associated with Java chats such as long initial page loading times, the technology has worked well and scaled well, and today there are more websites using Java chat interfaces than any other kind. Newer web technologies, such as Ajax and Flash, have been used as the basis for some new chat systems. They are hindered by incomplete support for networking in the underlying Javascript and Actionscript programming languages, and can't make use of efficient chat protocols. However, the trendiness of these technologies, as well as their strong support for graphical and usability features mean it is likely that these types of chats will become more widespread. The open-source project, phpFreeChat, and the AOL acquired startup, Userplane, are two providers of AJAX chat systems. Weird Town is a web community that provides a popular Flash-based chat. |