Displaying web pages and to the point chats ?

I've been wondering about this for quite a while now, seen a few scripts that are pretty basic web page scrapers, displaying text blocks and basic images. But what i'm interested in is linking a web page chat to an ingame chat window, say a billboard that acts as a chat screen, and then an accompanying chat box embedded in a webpage. Two methods I can think of, one is a basic irc setup, an ingame script capable of acting as a portal to an irc channel for anyone who wants to use it, the billboard i.e , and another bog standard web page irc, which are a dime a dozen really. Second way would be through another form of chat applet, such as a java or php chat app, but that could prove difficult.

The aim of all this is to link a very active website chat area to a second life sim, with a chat area there to allow the sim users to chat with ppl not using SL. Bit of a mad idea i know but it's a very community spirit site and i dont want to create a segregation between ppl chatting and ppl in SL, this seems a natrual way to bridge that gap.

This probably belongs in a dev topic somewhere as a suggestion etc, but i couldnt find anywhere to post it. If anyone has any ideas on how to do this using existing scripting techniques or knows where i should post this suggestion for the devs hehe, then let us know .

(Hmm... this is my first post in ages)

The Lindens have been promising HTML-on-a-Prim for quite a while, but so far, nothing of the sort has been released. Regardless, when it is released, the pages will only be re-rendered about once every 30 seconds, so a chat applet with that is out.

Currently, the only reasonable way to do this would be using XML-RPC. I believe I once heard that someone made an IRC client using a script on a different server as the gateway to the networks. Once you have the transmission of chat completed, making an xyText board should be relatively easy.

But then... what's the point? (Commercially, that is -- I understand that it would be a very interesting project). Why can't they just have mIRC or XChat or some other program running in the background, or a web browser open in the background...

It seems like too much work for too little gain.

Not sure a 30 second delay would be a killer, could have multiple overlaying prims on different timers, and just rotate alphas. Basically the same work around as scripting multiple IM/Emailers.

Course, it's academic until HTML on a prim, and not taking bets on when we will see it.

Since it looks like webpage extraction is going to be necessary for something, how is that done?

They're using the Firefo-- Sorry "powered by Mozilla" web page renderer. It won't be a fast-update, though, as I said -- We won't be playing RuneScape in SL, or watching animated GIFs using the web renderer.