Thanks, Chris. Looks like we're going to have to experiment which is not an encouraging prospect due to the variations in browsers, and the effects of browser version upgrades. We already have a heavily CSS-based non-table layout so maybe that's an option.
Googling had turned up quite a bit of discussion of the importance progressive rendering some time back, but it seems that that may have gone by the board more recently. Pity, but probably unavoidable to the increased complexity browsers have to handle today, and the generally faster data links reducing the need. Jim ----- Original Message Follows ----- From: Chris Devers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Christopher Schmidt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [email protected], "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] Force browser rendering of a partial dataset? Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:22:09 -0400 (EDT) > On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Christopher Schmidt wrote: > > > On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 06:31:43AM -0500, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > > Boston Mongers, I have a perl app sending a large data > > > set (> 1000 lines rendered) out thru apache and mod > > > perl. I want to force the browser to begin rendering > > > the data table before receiving the last row so that > > > the user doesn't have to wait. HTTP books and Googling > seem to turn up snippets of related info here and there > > > but I'd like to find a succint, precise summary of > > > how to do this. Anyone know of one that you can > > point me to? > > If your data is in a single <table> element, you're > > generally out of luck: Browsers tend to wait to render > > tables until the entire table is available. > > Right, and this is all client driven. Different versions > of different browsers will all decide how to respond to > this differently. Compounding things, the'll also respond > differently based on the HTML encoding: on a modern > browser, with strict XHTML, it *might* be possible to get > better results (because maybe the browser will try to > assume that the syntax is valid, and so it can start > rendering early), but no guarantees there. > > Some possible ways out, maybe: > > * break up the data into 100-row table chunks > * see if maybe pseudo-tables with CSS could work (???) > * skip the table and offer a CSV / XLS download link > > > > -- > Chris Devers > > _______________________________________________ > Boston-pm mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
