Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

New Scripting News layout

Author:Bill St. Clair
Posted:2/13/1999; 5:20:11 PM
Topic:New Scripting News layout
Msg #:2888
Prev/Next:2886 / 2889

I like the visual appearance of the new Scripting news layout, but it has a fatal flaw. In both Opera 3.5 (my preferred browser) and MSIE 3, the page is not displayed until everything has loaded. When connected via modem, this makes a lot of finger twiddling before I can see the new content. It appears from a quick perusal of the source that the bulk of the page is laid out as a two column table. My reading of the HTML 3.2 spec is that there is no way to specify in the tag how many columns are in the table, so the browser is forced to read all the row specs to find out. MSIE (on the Mac) used to start rendering before it knew this information and resize later on as necessary, but this nifty feature appears to be missing from Opera and MSIE on windows.

One solution I can think of is to render the page using Frames. Put the content in the left pane and the calendar in the right pane. I realize that some folks have a religious opposition to using frames, but this seems to me to be a good place for them.

Another solution is a "slow pipe" page that contains only the text on the left without the nifty calendar. I check Scripting News 4 or 5 times a day, so today's news is usually all I look at. Hence this solution would serve me well.

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