- From: Del Merritt <del@alum.mit.edu>
- Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:57:02 -0400
- To: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
David Woolley wrote:
>> Please explain to us why is incremental rendering extremely important? Is
>>
>
> It's in the nature of the medium, even if many "web designers" use
> techniques that frustrate it, often without need.
> :
> Note that PDF had to add incremental loading captilitise ("optimised PDF")
> to try and make it more usable on the internet, although that is just
> for documents.
For the handful of us who are also interested in printing, incremental
rendering is a grail. While [X]HTML is not a PDL, it, coupled with CSS,
is increasingly being used as such. When the document gets large, it's
all the more important for "@media print {}" to have a chance at doing
the rendering right within a tight memory budget.
A current (non-optimal) solution to the parent-child problem is to keep
the node structure around and chuck the text-only leaf data once it has
been rendered. If the node structure is heavy, though, it still
presents a memory burden. Sibling selectors present a similar problem,
compounded by the fact that you can't get rid of the siblings (or some
reduced cache of their presence) until you've handled the last one.
Think: "<body><p>blah</p><p>blah</p><p>blah</p>...<p>blah</p></body>"
Received on Tuesday, 26 September 2006 12:57:08 UTC