Hacker News Reader

Barely. Google nerfed it and now it is only supported for images. You could do full-on chat without JS by using it for the html itself previously.

I remember back in the day using cgi:irc, i guess it must have used something like that.

I actually wrote such a chat (infamously named "chat-stream"), about 2 pages of Perl… :-)

An example of that is the clock on this page: https://www.plover.com/~mjd/swatch.html

I wouldn't know a browser that would still support it. Because of said issues, it didn't see any significant use (apart from a few enthusiastic experiments early on.)