Re: Web pages loading

From: Peter van Dijk <peter-squid@dont-contact.us>
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1998 02:47:04 +0100

On Tue, Dec 29, 1998 at 09:08:10AM -0700, Alex Rousskov wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Dec 1998, Mohammed Hamed wrote:
>
> > I wonder why would it sometimes take the whole webpage to load or a large percentage of it before the browser displays it and sometimes the browser just displays whatever it has managed to load while keeping loading the rest of the page at the same time ?
> > what is the reason of the different behaviour ?
> > Is it just a browser behaviour or is there some directive to specify this ?
>
> One of the reasons is HTML layout. The browser cannot render HTML until all
> sizes on the viewable area are known. If, for example, a page has an image
> without explicit size specifications, the browser has to wait for that image
> to load to know the size and render appropriately.

Very important: tables. Tables can't be rendered until they're downloaded
completely _and_ the size of all images in it are known.

> Also, buffering on the server side (including CGIs) may affect the
> "presentation" behavior.

Greetz, Peter.

-- 
'I guess anybody who walks away from a root shell at :         Peter van Dijk
 a nerd party gets what they deserve!' -- BillSF     :peter@attic.vuurwerk.nl
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Received on Tue Dec 29 1998 - 18:23:19 MST

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