RE: Rendering question

OK.  That makes sense.  Now one other question:  Does the image get
downloaded by the User Agent, even it it's display is set to none?  I don't
know enough about how the browser actually works to answer this myself.

In my current development, I have discarded tables altogether, except for
the display of tabular data.  I use XHTML for structure and CSS for
positioning and style.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave J Woolley [mailto:david.woolley@bts.co.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2002 8:48 AM
To: 'RUST Randal'
Subject: RE: Rendering question




> Isn't it correct that the User Agent generates the document tree BEFORE
> rendering the page on the screen?
> 
[DJW:]  There is specific provision in CSS for incremental
rendering, even of tables++, so no, the whole tree is not
generated.  In any case, the image should not be fetched 
(for performance - it will not be rendered##) and the browser
need do nothing with the contents until the display: none
elemnet is closed.

Also, NS4, in particular, tends to parse in tag soup mode
(a problem for CSS), acting tag by tag, rather than recognizing
elements.

++ Most commercial sites fail to use this and therefore do
not display incrementally, even on browsers, like IE 5+, that
support it, because most commercial pages violate a "should
not" in the HTML specification and use tables for layout.

## A mass market GUI browser might chose to fetch the image
because it expects a document object model manipulation to
remove the display: none.

(Incidentally, real text only is used by quite a lot of people
who want fast and clean access to the web; pages that don't
render well text only generally are lacking in real content,
although may need to be accessed as the cheapest way of
using a service/buying something.

A large proportion of IE security bugs are dependent on JavaScript
and some organisations filter it at their boundary, and various
people (including, I believe, the German government, advise 
disabling support for it.)
-- 
David Woolley
BTS Holdings Limited

Tel: +44 (0)20 8401 9000	Fax: +44 (0)20 8401 9100
http://www.bts.co.uk	      http://www.bureauexpress.com



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Received on Tuesday, 8 January 2002 08:52:39 UTC