This page renders slowly on both IE and Netscape - everything
downloads before anything appears on screen. It is the behavior you'd
expect if the whole thing was wrapped in a table, yet there is no
table. What other sorts of problems normally cause this?

lkrubner@geocities.com (lawrence) wrote in
news:da7e68e8.0406271437.9249583@posting.google.co m:
[color=blue]
> This page renders slowly on both IE and Netscape - everything
> downloads before anything appears on screen. It is the behavior you'd
> expect if the whole thing was wrapped in a table, yet there is no
> table. What other sorts of problems normally cause this?[/color]

URL?

lawrence wrote:
[color=blue]
> This page[/color]

What page?
[color=blue]
> renders slowly on both IE and Netscape - everything downloads
> before anything appears on screen. It is the behavior you'd expect
> if the whole thing was wrapped in a table, yet there is no table.
> What other sorts of problems normally cause this?[/color]

With no url, I cannot help you.

--
Brian (remove ".invalid" to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

Brian <usenet3@julietremblay.com.invalid> wrote in message news:<10dundbtg86gqfb@corp.supernews.com>...[color=blue]
> lawrence wrote:
>[color=green]
> > This page[/color]
>
> What page?
>[color=green]
> > renders slowly on both IE and Netscape - everything downloads
> > before anything appears on screen. It is the behavior you'd expect
> > if the whole thing was wrapped in a table, yet there is no table.
> > What other sorts of problems normally cause this?[/color]
>
> With no url, I cannot help you.[/color]

http://www.publicdomainsoftware.org/

lawrence wrote:[color=blue]
> This page renders slowly on both IE and Netscape - everything
> downloads before anything appears on screen. It is the behavior you'd
> expect if the whole thing was wrapped in a table, yet there is no
> table. What other sorts of problems normally cause this?[/color]

I think it is *because* you use no tables. The browser must wait until
it has all of the markup before knowing what to do. And there is a *lot*
of markup. (Opera and Mozilla also wait for everything before rendering.)
And the connection is very slow: 1 KB/sec. It takes a minute to
download the page contents.

Design note: Your choice of contrasting colors is poor. Charcoal gray
on black? Black on dark purple? Green on brick red? No one over 35 and not
sitting in the dark can read the text.
A problem with light color text on dark background is that the text
gets washed out by the background unless the text is a large font, or is
bold. This is especially true for CRTs.

--
jmm dash list at sohnen-moe dot com
(Remove .TRSPAMTR for email)

James Moe <jmm-list.TRSPAMTR@sohnen-moe.com> wrote:[color=blue]
>lawrence wrote:[color=green]
>> This page renders slowly on both IE and Netscape - everything
>> downloads before anything appears on screen. It is the behavior you'd
>> expect if the whole thing was wrapped in a table, yet there is no
>> table. What other sorts of problems normally cause this?[/color]
>
> I think it is *because* you use no tables. The browser must wait until
>it has all of the markup before knowing what to do.[/color]

No, the browser should be able to start displaying the content before
it receives everything. That's how browsers have always behaved.
(Tables used to be an excpetion in that browsers wouldn't start to
render them before they had received the entire table. But modern
browsers will start to render a table and the redraw it as necessary.)
[color=blue]
>And there is a *lot*
>of markup. (Opera and Mozilla also wait for everything before rendering.)[/color]

Opera started to display the page after 10 seconds and then redrew the
page once it had received the stylesheets. The whole thing took 30
seconds to download and display (on broadband).
[color=blue]
> And the connection is very slow: 1 KB/sec. It takes a minute to
>download the page contents.[/color]

I think the server is partly at fault. The four PHP generated
stylesheets may also be a factor - for the size of stylesheet it took
a long time for them to arrive. Maybe the PHP needs to be looked at
again to see if it's making the best use of resources.

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net> <http://steve.pugh.net/>

James Moe wrote:
[color=blue]
> I think it is *because* you use no tables. The browser must wait
> until it has all of the markup before knowing what to do.[/color]

Where did you get this information? I know of no browser that does not
do incremental rendering when it's possible, and a tableless page can
be rendered incrementally. In fact, one can fine tune the code to get
even tables to be rendered that way.

--
Brian (remove ".invalid" to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net> wrote in message news:<e232e0tem95c3cvgk3k83rqik4rd6hunum@4ax.com>. ..[color=blue][color=green]
> >And there is a *lot*
> >of markup. (Opera and Mozilla also wait for everything before rendering.)[/color]
>
> Opera started to display the page after 10 seconds and then redrew the
> page once it had received the stylesheets. The whole thing took 30
> seconds to download and display (on broadband).
>[color=green]
> > And the connection is very slow: 1 KB/sec. It takes a minute to
> >download the page contents.[/color]
>
> I think the server is partly at fault. The four PHP generated
> stylesheets may also be a factor - for the size of stylesheet it took
> a long time for them to arrive. Maybe the PHP needs to be looked at
> again to see if it's making the best use of resources.[/color]

Without question the code is partly at fault - it was written in a
hurry and uses objects in a sloppy way and needs to be cleaned up. And
our server is from Interland and we've had problems with Interland.
But what struck me about this particular design was that it was
dramatically slower than any of the other designs we've used with this
code and on this server, so I was wondering if there was something
unique in the HTML that would cause slow rendering.

Thanks for the help.