What are the benefits to using iframes for ajax long polling?

Question

What are the benefits of using iframes for Comet long polling? Why not just keep an asynchronous ajax request in a script file pulled into the main page? Thanks.

Answer 1

It makes portability to IE possible: http://softwareas.com/portable-comet-its-the-iframe-stupid

Also, some people use it as a security feature. Within an iFrame you can enclose everything within a JavaScript closure and improve your security. There are better ideas for security though.

• http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/
• http://www.adsafe.org/