The document discusses the history and fundamentals of interactive web technologies. It begins with HTTP and its limitations for pushing data from server to client. It then covers early techniques like meta refresh and AJAX polling. It discusses longer polling, HTTP chunked responses, and forever frames. It introduces Comet and web sockets as solutions providing true real-time bidirectional communication. It also covers server-sent events. In conclusion, it recommends using all these techniques together and frameworks like Socket.IO and SignalR that abstract the complexities and provide high-level APIs.