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Comment by EgoIncarnate | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: It's a basic chat app. It's using a streaming http connection and css "::before" to reverse the order of new output, so it doesn't need javascript. Interesting hack, but...

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The CSS to reverse the order is:

    main {
        display: flex;
        flex-direction: column-reverse;
    }

The many ::before <style>s are used to update the connection count.

If you like these kinds of tricks, there's also an "order" CSS property, which lets you give elements any arbitrary order you like (by giving each element a numeric index). This can be useful for implementing sorting functionality, for example.

But what?

Page never end to load.

It breaks when you press `esc`. Either that, or the DOM just keeps growing and hogging memory until the tab eventually becomes unresponsive or crashes

Thanks, but isn't this the same if you use a virtual DOM? Is Mithril not prone to this problem if you keep adding stuffs to the list?

With javascript you can keep an EventSource connection open (which is immune to the `esc` thing), and you can prune the DOM and let the browser GC.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm too green to understand this, but I'll try to learn more about it later.

Presumably you'll eventually write something rather than lurking for hours and then it'll refresh.

In extremis a <meta refresh> could be used.

But then if you refresh every ten minutes or so, and I just happen to be finally responding after that long, I'm going to lose what I'm typing.

Not necessarily: browsers are pretty good at keeping form elements state across refreshes nowadays, especially Firefox. Cursor position perhaps, but not text.

Perhaps, but certainly there will be frustration there. Especially WRT cursor position changing.

I mean, sure, it works just fine if people refrain from doing certain arbitrary things (such as the scripted spamming that's happening as I write this), but that's why the grandparent comment said it was a hack and not a trick that one might want to attempt in production.

The spam had nothing to do with not using Javascript. I could easily have added a CAPTCHA or required accounts.

My Surface tablet got warmer and warmer on my lap.

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