Re: HTML Streaming
Albertfine@aol.com
Tue, 2 Sep 1997 13:55:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: Albertfine@aol.com
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 1997 13:55:57 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: <970902135540_299185603@emout08.mail.aol.com>
To: www-html@w3.org
cc: jptxs@idt.net
Subject: Re: HTML Streaming
jptxs@idt.net (jptxs) wrote:
>current META structures and CSS, and, as for loading while downloading, as
>things stand text will come accross quite quickly even across low bandwidth
>connections and images soon after so long as the graphic work is done
>correctly.
Their is a group of similar attributes that hint as to how an element will
be displayed. For example, the width attribute for the pre element. These
attributes allow a visual user agent to begin to render an element before it
is completely downloaded. For example, the cols attribute gives the width of
a table, a space is given and then the table is streamed. Without such
attributes, the visual agent would have to wait until the entire element is
download or risk redisplay. For example, if you have an image by a paragraph
without width and height attributes, the displayed paragraph would be moved
once the browser gets this information or not displayed until the browser has
the width and height of the image. I am sure you have noticed a flicker or
see things move around or notice a long pause while a page is completely
rendered. I thought it was a just a matter of sloppy coding. HTML is a very
liberal language. We all know that this;
<html>
<head>
<title>
Hello
</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>
Hello
</p>
</body>
</html>
is just as good as this;
<p>
Hello
<title>
Hello
</title>
Their are no real protocols in place for the arrangement of elements except
for head and body tags. I suggested a series of protocols for organizing
elements with the intent to send what is displayed first. It would be like
an assembler program for a computer language. This helped but did not correct
the problem. Many elements do not have a pre rendering attribute. For
example, the paragraph element. Also, new and experimental elements did not
have pre rendering attributes. The browser simply does not what to expect
when it is loading a page. It can start a 1 MB java program or display three
words. I then proposed the events tag. The events tag would list all the
elements in the HTML file and give a description of the element from a global
description of elements. New elements would not need pre rendering
attributes, experimental elements could be described, old element would not
need to given pre rendering attributes, the entire page would be pre
rendered, the browser could load a compiler before downloads a java program
etc etc etc
Albert Fine