RadioBanter - View Single Post - Wanted

July 10th 04, 05:21 AM

On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 03:32:31 -0000, (Dave Platt)
wrote:

In article ,
Howard wrote:

John - or anyone else who checked eBay,
Did you experience difficulty when selecting ham radio where the
screen would start to load, then start over and over and over several
tmes before 'settling in' on the page?

That may be due to the way that your browser works.

eBay seems to love to send their pages as a bunch of HTML and images,
in which the HTML code that invokes the images does _not_ prespecify
the actual size of the image and thus doesn't specify the actual
layout of the page. The full layout can only be known (actually,
computed "on the fly" by the browser) after all of the GIF or PNG or
JPEG images is fetched from eBay's servers.

If you're using a browser which tries to render pages "on the fly" as
the HTML and images are downloaded, then you will often see the
browser make several partial attempts to render the page. At several
points along the way, it'll download another image file, "see" the
size information for the image which the server returned, say to
itself "Duuh, the page layout I computed is now obsolete", and go back
and re-render everything.

I used to see this happening all the time with the older versions of
Netscape. The rendering engine in Mozilla and Firefox (I believe it's
code-named "Gecko") is savvy enough to avoid most of this partial
prerendering - as soon as it "sees" stuff in the page's HTML which it
"knows" is likely to result in on-the-fly layout changes, it stops
rendering until all of the necessary information has been downloaded
from the servers.

I don't know how well (or how badly) eBay's pages affect the renderer
in Internet Exploder, as I use it almost never.
Thanks Dave,
Thought it might be the browser, though oddly this only happend on the
amateur radio category and no others. I am using Mozilla 1.6 and
therein the anser may lie.