Chat clients have become a mainstay for most customer-facing websites today. These chat interfaces help companies in resolving customer queries and generating leads. While most chat applications extensively use JavaScript to build the frontend, a software developer named Kevin Kuchta from San Francisco has created a two-way chat app using only CSS and HTML.

Most of these chat implementations use JavaScript. The programming language is used by 95.2% of all websites today. Up until now, it was considered as a difficult task to design a two-way chat system without using JavaScript or Python programming language. There are many libraries that offer bidirectional chat implementation using Python. Developers who earlier tried to create bidirectional web chats exclusively used either JavaScript or Python.

Kevin Kuchta impressed one and all by managing to create this fully-functional two-way chat application only using CSS and HTML. The official description on his GitHub page says, “this is a truly monstrous async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.” The app can be used to send messages between internet users without reloading the page.

Kuchta has combined background images loaded via pseudo selected and forever-loading index page to implement this solution. He explains that the inner workings of the app and what goes behind the scene when the data is sent by one of the chat users and when the message is received on the other end.

The app is inspired by cybersecurity researcher, Davy Wybiral’s demonstration of how websites can make use of CSS and HTML to monitor mouse movements. Wybiral’s implementation has received positive reactions on social media. Some of these techniques use CSS-based user tracking methods to collect information like screen resolution, browser name, click events, and details of OS.

Kuchta’s app demonstrates that two-way web chat shows how chat interfaces can be brought to life without relying on interpreted high level programming languages like JavaScript.