tedster - 1:22 pm on Jan 16, 2001 (gmt 0)

Right you are, using width and height does help the browser render the text earlier, and is highly recommended.

But things aren't always straightforward. Depending on how deeply nested tables are, it can still be a long wait for anything to appear on screen. Have you ever had a page say "document done", but the browser took another 10-15 seconds to render anything at all? That's often a sign of a complex table structure.

Explorer does a better job than Netscape does with rendering the text early on.

One other factor that can delay elements appearing is jpeg compression. Even after the download is finished, the client still needs to decompress a jpeg on their own machine, and with high compression percentages, this also adds time. The progressive mode helps in this area, but sometimes it is considered aesthetically unacceptable.