Is there a way to prevent the display of a page until all of the objects on that page have been received?
One of my great annoyances with the web is what I’ve dubbed the “splip, splop, splap” presentation of a page, the various objects appearing in what seems a random order.
What I would like is for nothing to appear until all of the components have been downloaded. Would it be possible to have a first object be one that masks the others until the page is fully received?
I hope I’m clear in my wishes and I will be most grateful for any suggestions.
The problem that you may have trying something like this - if it is even possible - is that your visitors wander off because they don’t think anything is happening. People like something to grab their attention in the first few seconds - if that doesn’t happen they are gone…
Visitors generally expect this sort of behaviour and the way to minimise it is to make sure that all graphic files etc. are optimised size wise to ensure as fast a load time as possible.
The other, MAJOR, caveat to this is that it would likely use the Javascript trigger: onLoad. That part is fine and good, but if any item on the page either; a) takes a while to fianlly load, or b) does not load at all, that event is not triggered. So, then nothing on your page appears.
The behavior is possible with many of the scripting libraries; Proto, Mootools, jQuery, etc… Some are action-ized, others presently would require some hand-coding.
I would suggest that the idea be limited to particular items or sections of your page (ie not the whole page, but rather just a few graphics or a few html items), as some content is better than none if things start to fail.
Rhetorical: If the effect somehow failed, would the page still be valuable and navigable for the user?
An example of the behavior can be seen at a website under development which can be seen at http://homepage.mac.com/taliesinsoft/ECR/index.html. The actual time for a DSL or cable download of a page is normally within a second. That the various items appear in a hodge-podge order is what I’d like to eliminate, and, yes, I know I’m being somewhat picky! The random appearance of the items is particularly noticeable when one changes pages.
So, I’m open to suggestions as to whether there is some effect or action I can apply that would make the presentation of the page smooth.
Make sure your web page is a small as possible (file size), so page load time is reduced, then staggered loading is less noticeable.
I see ALL your text is gif text and not HTML text. This is making your page MUCH bigger than it needs to be, this is causing increased staggered loading from page to page.
Try converting as much text as you can to HTML text.
The payoff is at least you will be found in the search engines - which you probably aren’t at the moment, as the search engines can’t read your text in the picture files you’ve got.
David
On 4 May 2008, at 00:32, James L. Ryan wrote:
An example of the behavior can be seen at a website under development which can be seen at <http://homepage.mac.com/taliesinsoft/ECR/index.html>. The actual time for a DSL or cable download of a page is normally within a second. That the various items appear in a hodge-podge order is what I’d like to eliminate, and, yes, I know I’m being somewhat picky! The random appearance of the items is particularly noticeable when one changes pages.
So, I’m open to suggestions as to whether there is some effect or action I can apply that would make the presentation of the page smooth.
David Owen
Freeway Friendly Web hosting and Domains ::
(Test Drive a web hosting account for Free)