Originally posted by RobbieAB
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Nobody uses them because HTML5 is not universally deployed or supported. No browser actually implements all of the _draft_ HTML5 features yet, not even WebKit-based browsers or Firefox 4 beta.
The server-side DOM events and WebSockets are not yet supported in any stable released version of Firefox, and I'm unsure what the status is in WebKit (though I believe both are supported). Given that WebSockets has changed several times in the last couple years, relying on it is a bad idea right now.
So yeah, when HTML5 is an actual thing and not just a collection of incomplete draft proposals, it could replace Flash. Until then, either use the workarounds that people have used for years (polling or streaming/never-ending requests) or use Flash.
Orbited essentially requires server side support, which carries larger infrastructure costs.
Do you think Flash is magically getting streaming data from a server without you deploying a server capable of efficiently handling the streaming data? Do you think there's some magical way of making a pre-fork server like most Apache deployments actually able to efficiently handle thousands of clients waiting for push notifications and streaming data updates that requires nothing more than a tweak to the HTML spec to achieve?
If you want streaming or push notifications of any kind, with any protocol, you're going to have to roll out a hefty server infrastructure in addition to your stock request-response HTTP server infrastructure.
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