- From: Mikko Rantalainen <mira@cc.jyu.fi>
- Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 11:08:05 +0300
- To: Anoop Kumar <akumar@novell.com>
- CC: www-html@w3.org
Anoop Kumar / 2003-06-13 09:07:
> To my understanding HTML document is a sequential doc with text and
> images. Is a way to prioritize any of the text or images with any tags
> so that that can be displayed at the browser first .
>
> Now the problem with HTML is if we put a huge gif /data the small size
> data will be delayed to get displayed.The web designer now needs to
> anticipate this and do accordingly. If we can prioritize any data
> segment / picture segment with some special tags then that can get
> displayed first if browser also understands that.
Do you mean that the user agent ("browser") doesn't display text
content before loading all images, no matter big or small? Or that
the user agent starts downloading the biggest image before loading
small ones first and missing all the small images is bad? If it's
the former, then just get a more intelligent user agent that
displays alternative content until it has loaded full content - you
do have reasonable alternative content, don't you?
If it's the latter problem the I'm afraid that a reasonable solution
would be to add some kind of "delayed" flag to big images. This
would be used to remove those ugly JavaScript hacks some web
designers decide to use instead (background downloading with a
script and later switching the image on screen or something).
I'm thinking something along the lines
<img alt="[A huge illustration about the issue]" src="..."
delayed="delayed"/>
Where delayed flag would instruct user agent to put this file to
secondary queue so that more important stuff would be loaded first.
After saying that, I feel that we don't need such a feature because
it would take quite some time before user agents implemented this
kind of stuff and a better algorithm for those user agents would be
to send HEAD request for every linked file, order the results
according the file size (smallest first) and proceed to download as
usual. This method doesn't require anything from the page author to
work and has only minor overhead caused by the HEAD requests. In
addition, this would for stylesheets and any other kind of external
linked documents.
--
Mikko
Received on Friday, 13 June 2003 04:08:11 UTC