Chat and frames

[victor123]

Hi,

I am designing a chat system. It has three frames: conversation, users and posting frame. The problem i have is that, in the conversation frame, the user has to scroll down to see the newest posts, which is not very nice.
I can solve it by limiting the number of messages displayed, but i know there must be a way to solve the problem. In the chats i know the last message is shown automatically and the user only has to scroll upwards if he wants to see earlier messages but not the last ones. Can somebody suggest a way to do it?

Many thanks in advance.

[Alexei Kubarev]

easy as hell

put a named anchor at the bottom called bottom

then load this page: chat-frame.php#bottom

[victor123]

Thanks Alexei, it has worked partially... the problem now is that when you call chat-frame.php#bottom, it goes right to that point and skips all the rest, so that the new information is not displayed. Sounds a bit weird, i know...

[victor123]

Sorry for the previous post, it was not very clear... let me explain: in chat-frame.php, i have a javascript function so that it provides auto-refreshing for the page. In this way chat-frame.php is updated.
This javascript function calls chat-frame.php#bottom

When you remove #bottom, auto-refreshing is performed ok and the new messages appear correctly (however the problem of the scroll persists). When you use #bottom, auto-refreshing is not performed correctly: the new messages do not appear.

Thanks for your help.

[Alexei Kubarev]

put a JS function AFTER the named anchor then or use Meta tags for autorefresh

[frogrocker]

Can't you show new messages at the top?

[Alexei Kubarev]

this will be pretty bad as its not really nice look take a look at all other chats ;)

[frogrocker]

How do you know until you try?

[Alexei Kubarev]

I did before: its pretty irritating: its better to make it scroll down, and its possible to do so as well

[victor123]

Hi,

I sorted it out, it is not very elegant though. What i did was to use the js function to call a file 'temp.php' periodically. This file then does:

header('Location: chat_frame.php#bottom');

This works, but i rather try the solutions you have offered...

Thanks a lot.