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?

From reading the relevant section of the CSS2 spec [
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#propdef-display ] it merely
states the element will create no boxes in the formatting structure. I'd
expect the guys at Netscape will argue their case of saving downloads of
content "not required".

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.

Received on Monday, 1 October 2001 04:09:04 UTC