evilbug — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 13:35:15 +0000

It's just yesterday I "converted" everything to css. Before I had those small tables in one big table and as you see NOTHING displayed until the content loaded
I think what I did now is much much faster. Though I had A HELL OF A TIME making it work for both IE and Netscape.

Okay, I misunderstood

Bimjo — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 04:51:23 +0000

what you needed. I think you're right, since you're already using 5 different tables with none nested you are at the mercy of your content in each cell.

You can maybe help yourself out by making the corner graphics etc background images and using a 1x1 trans gif as the cell contents for those cells. Stretch it in html to the height/width you need. I do that for the edge of the "paper" on my site and it's usually the last part to come in, while everything else displays.

Other than that you either live with it as is, or go with a different design altogether.

Sorry I haven't been more help.

**** Edited to add:
Just thought of something. Since you are using CSS to position your tables using a DIV tag, is there some reason you couldn't just configure your DIV with a background color and not use a table at all?

Make your blue line graphics one image and place the image, a break tag, content, another break tag, and the bottom image.

I'm doing that on my personal site (in sig) and it loads really fast. Granted, it's all in one DIV (well, nested 4 deep), but... it might be worth looking at.

Obviously your layout goes to hell in a non-CSS browser. Does now too, though to a lesser degree.

On a cheerier note, the content (as is)loads very quickly in the newest build of Mozilla (M17 I think- faster than IE 5.0 even) and the graphics come in later.

[Edited by Bimjo on 08-16-2000 at 01:04 AM]

evilbug — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 01:27:46 +0000

exactly!! there is no way to do that using separate tables! so that's why I am looking for a way to make table load... blah blah blah you know the rest

Mark Hensler — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 01:20:51 +0000

I don't think you can.

Bimjo's site is all vertical. Yours has paraller tables. When you put tables back to back () it creates a line break (so they're over under, not side by side).

You could maybe chop a little more off, tho-. Everything from the "Search The Net" and above could be put into a new table, and the four links at the botton could be too (not that they'll help much).

ALSO...
I just noticed your news thingy. I have one on my site. If you remove that, you will probably notice a speed increase too. The javascript has to run (from the other guys server) and get the latest headlines, and then it'll display.

evilbug — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 01:07:51 +0000

ok, take a look at http://www.divein.to

how would you do that using multiple tables?

Mark Hensler — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 00:59:05 +0000

That's exactly what I was trying to explain.
I'm glad someone has an example.

No, you can't, but

Bimjo — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 00:52:36 +0000

you can make the page appear to load more quickly by limiting the size of your tables. If you have a 1000 row table, make 10 100 row tables instead.

Obviously this may not work if you have a complex table background graphic, but it does work.

WARNING!! Link to commercial site follows!! It's an example, I'm net trying to sell you something. Honest!

I do this on my business site The Digital Page. You'll notice that as the page loads the text comes in first as the graphics at the top of the "paper" load.

This is actually three tables, the top section, the text section, and the links section, each its own table, but it looks like one large table.

This might be a possible solution to your problem.

hth

evilbug — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 00:28:35 +0000

ok, never mind.

Don't worry about it

All I wanted to know is if there is any way to make the content of a table show up on the screen as it loads not after all the content loads. Tables have this "disability" -- they dont show the content until the whole table is loaded. For example if you have 1000 rows in your table nothing will be visible until all 1000 rows are downloaded.

I guess there is no way to do this for netscape..

Mike Fisher — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 00:07:51 +0000

....I still don't see what you mean.

What I -think- you're getting at is how to set it so the table is the full size? Ugh. I don't know.

Mark Hensler — Tue, 15 Aug 2000 23:56:29 +0000

this is something I could use...

The only thing I've seen that you can do to speed this up is actually choping your tables. If you have one table that holds the entire content, see if you can do without it or split it into several smaller ones.