How does in-browser chat work?

Question

Just curious. How exactly does chatting in a browser work? Usually if a user goes to a web page, his/her webbrowser requests the page content. A server produces output and s

Answer 1

There are some push technologies, such as Comet, but they're not widely implemented. Most of the time this is accomplished via polling at some small interval with AJAX and downloading any new messages that are available since the last downloaded message.