It's funny that the article says "This enables server sent events" without actually referring to the HTML5 Server Sent Events API : http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/eventsource/basics/ SSE is realtime server->client protocol that's fully compatible with HTTP and has lower handshake overhead (no Upgrade roundtrip, doesn't require HTTPS to go through proxies).
Agreed. Both approaches have their place, but I see SSE getting overlooked too often.
It's also not supported by IE yet: http://caniuse.com/eventsource
Compare with http://caniuse.com/websockets