Controlling the Progress bar/Status bar

I recently checked out phpmychat (http://www.phpheaven.net/projects/p.../rubrique4.html). They use a hidden frame that refreshes periodically, so you would expect that there would be periodic reloading of the progress bar in the status bar, right? No - they somehow managed to remove the progress bar, stop the mouse from showing the "thinking" icon, and prevented the status bar text from displaying the url to the page that is reloading. It's rather odd, and I am very curious as to how these goals can be achieved.

Any clues?

Much obliged,

Peter

mugane,

Are they showing a pop-up window for chat or it's in the main page? Yep- looks quite unusual coding!

You can hide the the status bar message, but not the hole bar.
http://www.hotscripts.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?bool=AND&query=hide+status+bar&catid=all

After further testing I concluded that they don't do anything special at all, and simply refresh the message window after a default 10 seconds. At the time of refresh, the status bar does use a normal progress bar.

The reasoning behind this behavior is that it is not important to refresh the message window with messages (except messages sent by the visitor) more often than this. I grudgingly agree; it will probably take 10 seconds or so to read and reply to a message anyhow.

mugane, Thanks for information. I was also curious about it...

I think they are using a funny feature that is very easy with php, they just don't finish sending the page never so the connection between the browser and the server is never closed, meanwhile they continue pooling the database until a new message arrives. If i'm not wrong this feature usage is documented in www.php.net annotated documentation