Sez Phil Howard:
Merely laying out the page isn't enough. It helps, and unfortunately some browsers (e.g. explorer) don't seem to even use this feature correctly. Having a bunch of blank positions where buttons are supposed to be doesn't give one any idea a button is supposed to be there, or even where "there" is, until some stuff, either the first pixels of that button, or the buttons around it, are getting loaded. Seeing only the top button of a table of buttons doesn't help to find where the active space is for the green one you know you always click on, or the one with the person's head.
One approach that can be used to get around this is to make all the images be very small low res only files, and include some Javascript that will detect when those are loaded and then start the medium res loading, and after that, the high res loading. But I would not want to depend on people who have degrees in graphical arts to be in a position to manage network bandwidth controls, so other fundamental solutions are still needed.
All of this comes down to the clue level of the page author. The IMG tag is one of the most flexible tags, and already has a means to do everything you're trying to fix. Page layout speed: The HEIGHT and WIDTH parameters (when applied to ALL images on a page) facilitate laying out the entire page before any images are loaded. Unknown buttons: The ALT parameter can be used to provide a description of an image while you're waiting for the image to load. Judiciously chosen labels can make possible to even surf without loading images. Serialized images: The LOWSRC parameter (which Netscape honors, not sure about MSIE) will cause a low-res version of each image to be loaded before the browser starts grabbing high-res versions. With persistent HTTP and small images, this can be almost instantaneous. For a perfect example of HEIGHT, WIDTH, and ALT parameters, check out the cisco main page. I can't find a good LOWSRC example offhand. Don't invent a new transfer protocol when simply creating better data will fix the problem. -S -- Stephen Sprunk "Oops." Email: stephen@sprunk.org Network Consultant -Albert Einstein ICBM: 33.00151N 96.82326W