History of chat?

Individual chat sites rise and fall in popularity pretty quickly, but the history of web chat is characterized more broadly by trends in underlying web technologies. The first chat sites featured simple interfaces made from dynamically generated HTML pages. The use of HTML allowed sites to incorporate fonts, colors, links, and images into their interfaces, giving them a more modern hypermedia feel, which was an advantage over older, but more established text-based chat services like IRC. The biggest downside to HTML chat was in its interactivity. Every message sent to an HTML chat required a form submission and subsequent page load, which meant that there was a waiting period between the time a user could send one message and the time they could begin to type the next one. Recieving messages also required frequent page reloads, and could lead to delays, page flicker, and distracting browser activity. For these reasons HTML chats have largely fallen out of use today, although some of the older HTML chat sites, just as Chathouse still remain active.