RE: The "display" property

I don't necessarily see why the presentation specifics set on a reference
element should affect whether the data being referenced is downloaded or
not.  In many cases an author might want to access the data inside the
referenced object via scripting regardless of whether it's on the screen or
not.  This would be a fairly unusual scenario when the object in question is
raster image data, but would be less unusual if that object was vector image
data, and even less unusual if it was, say, a file containing script.
Now I'm off-topic, but I don't think this is the sort of thing that the CSS
spec would or should mandate; it's more of a decision for a browser
developer to make dependent on the user agent's caching architecture.

	Aaron

-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Daniel BODEA
Sent: Monday, October 01, 2001 01:34
To: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: The "display" property


> > > > Given an <img style="display: none">, is the navigator required to
> > > > download the image and cache it or not? Moreover, is this a standard
> > > > or should each navigator implement its behaviour the way it sees
> > > > fit? After some experimentation, it seems IE 5.5 does download and
> > > > cache the images though Netscape still doesn't work.
> >
> > > There's no need to download the image with display: none; so it
probably
> > > isn't under Gecko based browsers, of which Netscape 6 is one.
> >
> > My question still is... is this behaviour (display: none <=> download)
> > clearly defined in any spec or not?
>
> My personal thought on this is if we're not going to display this visual
> element, we don't need to download it (just yet). However, I would expect
> the user agent to hold on to the image data if it's display property
changes
> to a visual state (in this case, inline), even if it goes non visual
again.

Wouldn't it be great if the navigator started downloading the "display:
none" images at the same time as the "onLoad" event is fired? Just a
thought...

On the other hand, looking over the docs again, the same question about
downloading images goes for the "visibility: hidden" elements. The
difference is that these elements DO create boxes. Still there is nothing
clearly stated in the recommendation on this.

Dan

Received on Monday, 1 October 2001 04:48:02 UTC