As I said before, Robin, it is a no win. This one does work for the majority of users. I have a couple more viewpoints from the other side to offer.

1. For the majority it works well for, it is much faster than a browser/refresh type could ever hope to be. Should one be slowed down to crawling pace?

2. I don't know how many the chat room has at one time - I'll say 10 for the sake of argument. Let's say we get a refresh every 5 seconds. That's adding 120 page requests per minute on an http server that already seems to be working hard. It may be significant, it may be not. But if it was would it be worth risking crashing all http services for?

3. Programs like java based chat rooms are purpose built rather than trying to adapt a web server. Is it not better to use tools designed for a job? One major advantage of any (Java or otherwise) dedicated chat is that you only need to send out the text and you are not tying up your web server to do this as usualy, it would be a separate server.

I must stress here, I'm not trying to argue a right or wrong - there are merits both ways. I'm just trying to give the other side to some of your comments.