Re: Image-dislay status media query for reducing reflows -was Re: FAQ about reasons behind CSS

> In most of the pages I visit, Google AdSense and the "Shoot the  
> monkey" flash ads are the largest reflow culprits. Also, the  

Are "shoot the monkey" ads those horrible things that expand and
hide what you are trying to read when you accidentally move the
cursor over them?

> proliferation of AJAX will cause a lot more reflows in page display,  
> as different parts of documents will be loaded dynamically after the  
> page has already been drawn. I think this is one issue where the  
> market has spoken: users have begun to expect and deal with reflowing  
> pages, and creating more CSS bloat will not solve it.

The market for most of these features isn't the web page consumers,
who would prefer to not have the adverts at all - except if they 
consider the economics and realise that they would have to pay
for the contents otherwise - but the content providers.  I think
many consumers don't understand the technology well enough to realise
that it is possible to have pages that don't wait for all the 
text replacement graphics to load before displaying anything, or
to display dead beat but incrementally.

(AJAX is a sort of technology that need not have this problem -
although it has other problems in that it produces resources that are
not hyperlinkable - the google maps site doesn't suffer sudden reflows,
although it is quoted as a prime example of AJAX.)

Received on Thursday, 30 June 2005 21:22:47 UTC