Control over how the page looks while loading

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Control over how the page looks while loading

how to stop the page appearing until ready

roddy

3:23 am on Oct 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

I'm currently working on my first all CSS site. It's going pretty well. Basic structure of each page is this

DIV1 (title bar)
DIV2 (menubar1, floats left)
DIV3 (menubar2, floats right)
DIV4 (central content)

As I say, I'm happy with the way things are going. However, when the page loads it does so bit by bit over about 5 seconds (dial-up). First the title bar comes in, then one menubar, then half the other menu, then the rest of the menu and some of the content, then the rest of the content and DONE.

Is there anyway I can have the title bar load (so users can see something happen) and then have the browser load the other DIVs without rendering, and only display when complete?

95% of my users are on IE5 or 6 and as this is quite a minor thing I'm not worried about cross-browser support for this.

Roddy

tedster

4:16 am on Oct 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

In general, your content will be rendered in the order it appears in the HTML document. Lost packets, etc, can change this in any one case, but most of the time it works that way.

So if your layout permits this, use position:absolute for the content you want to see load first -- then place that div right after the <body> tag in the HTML. I do this with text content on several sites -- and the visitors immediately see something relevant to their interests (or their search) while the "decor" fills in around it.