CSS-Only Chat

A truly monstrous async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.

Wait what

This is an asynchronous chat that sends + receives messages in the browser with no reloads and no javascript.

Ok so how

Background-images loaded via pseudoselectors + a forever-loading index page (remember Comet?).

Say that again?

Ok, so there are two things we need the browser to do: send data and receive data. Let's start with the first.

Sending Data

CSS is really limited in what it can do. However, we can use it to effectively detect button presses:

.some-button:active {
  background-image: url('some_image.jpg')
}

What's cool is that a browser won't actually load that background image until this selector is used - that is, when this button is pressed. So now we have a way to trigger a request to a server of our choice on a button press. That sounds like data sending!

Now, of course, this only works once per button (since a browser won't try to load that image twice), but it's a start.

Receiving Data