Page flashes white before loading

Problem with my webpage

[Familyman501]

My webpage flashes white each time before loading. What could cause that?
<snip>
Thanks:)

[edited by: engine at 1:58 pm (utc) on June 1, 2006]
[edit reason] TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[StupidScript]

(Note that your URL is not allowed. ;) )

I saw a very brief flash of white before the page loaded in Internet Explorer, but nothing like that in Firefox.

In the past, it has seemed to be an artifact of the "content-type" META tag and how MSIE handles that. Maybe it reads the page into memory in order to validate the charset before rendering the page? I dunno, but try a test without that META tag and see if it goes away.

[stapel]

I don't see a declaration for the background color of your page. If a browser is (as is common) set to have a default white background, you could get that "flash" of background color before the background image starts loading. (An HTML color, naturally, is going to display faster than an image.)

Try setting your background color to something similar to the bluish hue of the background image. That should take care of any "flash", I would think.

Eliz.

[Patrick Taylor]

What could cause that?

I've noticed this effect in IE, when I'm loading dark-coloured pages from a server on the far side of the world - especially if the server is a little slow. On one of my sites (in Australia - I'm in the UK) I've also tested the pages on a UK server and there's no white flash at all, whereas there tends to be when I view the Australian versions from the UK, flicking from one page to another. It isn't caused by the background colour setting either, as it's set dark.

Firefox and Opera don't show the white flash, ever.