another pet peeve

[rcjordan]

What is it with pages that load just enough to let you read the first paragraph or two then reload?!?!! Seems like I'm seeing more and more of them --particularly on the webzine sites.

Yes, in some instances they do get to launch a 2nd banner. (My contract with my ad broker prohibits that, btw.) But I've seen other sites that don't refresh the banner. I've been assuming that it's caused by the serving of dynamic pages, but --WHATEVER the cause-- it's a pain.

[Brett_Tabke]

I've not seen this behavior - then again, I use Opera. It is probably something ie specific. Got a url?

[rcjordan]

It's apparently a cross-browser issue. NS4+ reloads this story from The Standard [thestandard.com]. MSIE5 renders it once, without a refresh.

I expect this is part of their cache-busting routine on the banner serving. I ran into it myself when I was coding an iframes/ilayer swap. Whatever the reason, it's a pain.

[tedster]

NN4.72 loads this page for me with no redraw, but I've seen an increasing amount of what you describe. The offending pages I've checked out almost always use css as well as nested tables for layout.

NN has been more than a little weak in its implementation of css, and it also has more trouble than MSIE rendering nested tables. The combination can be deadly.

The Standard link you offered creates a style sheet through document.write, but only after running a pretty thorough browser detection script. I'm assuming that therein lies the culprit. Netscape loads the stylesheet info, gets to the bottom of the nested tables and sometimes the initial calculations don't work out, so it redraws the page.

I wouldn't think the ad reloads are intentional, just a by-product of the browser snafu.

[rcjordan]

Thanks Tedster. Yup, I'm on NN4.08 (NN has better right-button options for patroling web articles). I agree that it's probably css, which accounts for the webzines having the highest occurrence rate. As I said, I've run afoul of this when trying to inject a remotely served banner and break cache. For NN users, I chose not to break banner cache rather than invoke the full page reload --there was no problem w/ MSIE, I could refresh the iframe only.