Comment by omoikane

If you have control over the HTTP server, a different technique is to set "refresh" in the response header[1], which makes the client fetch new animation frames periodically. This is the technique used in a 2013 IOCCC entry to show a continuously updated clock that's rendered as PNG[2].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

[2] https://www.ioccc.org/2013/mills/index.html

The "Refresh" header is encoded backwards on this line:

https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/619f554bbdb19e5003a...