Well, technically it's an abomination no matter from what angle you look at it (and I am looking at the orbited sourcecode in another window right now).
To me comet is a testament to our collective failure to demand proper tools from the "big guys" (Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft). The term "web 2.0" was coined roughly 7 years ago and even long before that it has been clear that some sort of WebSocket would be incredibly useful to have in a browser.
Yet no single browser vendor (to my knowledge) has impemented it today.
Imagine where we could stand if only Firefox had a true, non-standard Socket class already. People would be using it (socket for the fox, comet-hacks for the rest) and IE market share would probably be dropping faster than ever because all the fancy new apps work better elsewhere.
But I digress, this is mostly whining. You have a point; the comet hack, as ugly as it is, is justified by the lack of proper alternatives. But still, an abomination on so many levels...
To me comet is a testament to our collective failure to demand proper tools from the "big guys" (Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft). The term "web 2.0" was coined roughly 7 years ago and even long before that it has been clear that some sort of WebSocket would be incredibly useful to have in a browser.
Yet no single browser vendor (to my knowledge) has impemented it today.
Imagine where we could stand if only Firefox had a true, non-standard Socket class already. People would be using it (socket for the fox, comet-hacks for the rest) and IE market share would probably be dropping faster than ever because all the fancy new apps work better elsewhere.
But I digress, this is mostly whining. You have a point; the comet hack, as ugly as it is, is justified by the lack of proper alternatives. But still, an abomination on so many levels...