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If everything is wrapped inside one big <div> or <table>, then rendering is often delayed until everything is ready - but you can't depend on it.
eg.
<body style="visibility:hidden" onload="this.style.visibility='visible'">
Though if someone had JavaScript turned off they'd just never see your page! So I'd advise against this in all but the most desperate of circumstances. I've had to do something similar once as a bug fix* for IE4 - though that was for an application where scripting was an absolute requirement anyway.
*for those interested the bug was: We had a dropdown and if someone changed a selected option a form would be posted to refresh the page. If they did this before the whole page had loaded up, the frame would entirely dissappear! If I viewed the source in the space where it was I'd see the frameset source!!! To prevent this I hid the whole page until it loaded. Weird eh? ;)
window.offscreenBufferring=false;That makes sure that the entire page is put into a buffer and displayed all at once. Note: IE5+.
Hope that helps!
Happy coding! :)
Before you make your final design decisions, I'd suggest doing some careful testing to compare how visitors respond to an all-or-nothing loading sequence compared to letting the browser display things as they come in.
