Hey is the shoutbox in an <iframe> tag? I was wondering because everytime someone 'shouts' the shoutbox refreshes but not the whole page? I have used an iframe before but I noticed that when I type something in and 'shout'...I don't see a loading cursor and things like that. So can anyone tell me if the shoutbox is in an iframe?

Greatly appreciated!

No its not. Its using AJAX on a Timer

JavaScript Timers with setTimeout and setInterval.

Oh wow....I don't even know those things. But thanks for telling me...now I know it isn't in an iframe!

If you know some JS, and you want to get something similar yourself, just Google AJAX. You'll need to know PHP or some other server side script also (which will submit data to the JS script).

I think they're quite a few scripts out there that do all the complicated stuff themselves and let you do some very simple things to retrieve data. If you're still interested in knowing more after that, then you could go into how it works, etc. It is also possible to read complicated XML files using AJAX files. That means that the back-end needn't submit the HTML stuff itself (which would make the code pretty inflexible, wouldn't it?). It would only submit the information in a handy format and your JS would perform the necessary actions.

I did try going into all this, but I gave up pretty fast because I didn't see myself doing anything too complicated in AJAX for quite some time.

Just for fun, I suggest that you read up about what AJAX is. That way you'll know what's happening when you're browsing your email on GMail or chatting on Facebook (and the many other websites that use AJAX).

Thank you for posting a thread! You've not only learned something here, you've made this discussion potential reference material for many others (members of YC as well as people looking up on Google)

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I'm off to sigcont.com

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - Notice the XML on the end. A lot of web apps you see that include "ajax" don't actually use XML. A large portion just return text or HTML, and some even use JSON. However, AJAT (text), AJAH (html), and AJAJ (json) all sound dumb, not catchy and would add to more confusion. My point is, don't think you have to use XML in order to use AJAX.

Thanks for the tips and suggestions to both of you guys !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I already know some PHP and I will try to look into AJAX!

AJAX is a great language to know, and you can do some great things with it. For example, when you type your search terms into Google, the drop-down list of suggestions that you get is generated by AJAX, unless I'm much mistaken.

You can simply download a whole Shoutbox script and implement it into your code. For now it's much faster and easier. After you implement it into your code, you'll see how it works and where to start. Simply, use your best friend, Google.

yer AJAX doesn't have to be xml because i created a whole shoutbox with no XML
also another reason not to use XML is that the documentelement property does not work in IE

Stupid IE!!!