Re: HTML Streaming

> No, streaming basically means to view while downloading. Maybe you are 
> thinking of push?

No, streamed audio or video data is quite common.

> I describe how a <p> tag would be streamed in an earlier post.

Ah. I must have missed that. Can you repeat? And do you mean just the
<P> start-tag, or the whole P element?

As I said, one of Netscape's original claims to fame was it _did_
display while downloading, almost word by word, including the
[in]famous "Venetian-blind" rendering of GIFs. But they abandoned it,
apparently (a) because of the problems in rendering flow-arounds when
the image size was not known in advance; (b) when rendering tables
used for formatting, because the whole table has to arrive first; and
(c) [the most important] their commercial users who have paid-for
images doing advertising wanted to make damn sure the browser waited
for the whole image to arrive and be displayed before any text was
displayed, as that forces people to see the image -- otherwise they
might read the text and decide to go elsewhere before the image had
finished downloading.

So if you're doing this streaming yourself, well done and good luck.
If you're hoping to persuade the big commercial browsers to follow,
forget it :-)

///Peter

Received on Friday, 29 August 1997 19:23:10 UTC