Interview with David Pollak of Athena Design regarding “Dynamic
DOM Rewriting”, a technology they’re developing using Mozilla.
Dynamic DOM rewriting “allows an HTML/XML author to tag certain
DOM elements on the page as dynamic. The browser then hooks up to
the server that served the page and says, “send me the deltas for
these DDR tagged elements” (the method by which this happens
degrades from a true server push to a periodic client poll/pull).
When the elements change on the server side, the deltas between the
currently displayed DOM elements and the new DOM elements are
pushed back to the browser. The browser updates the DOM and redraws
the changed element in the browser window.”
“The benefit to web developers is that they can make pages that
are dynamic, where dynamic means that data in the world can change
and be reflected in the browser in real time. It’s not a page
refresh. It’s a true stateful session where the server changes the
stuff in the browser. This enables real-time stock quotes without
an applet and through a firewall.”