On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 5:03 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Christopher,
> Thanks for the reply.  At one point a some years ago I
> believe if you defined the column widths of the table in the
> top row of cells browsers would render it as received since
> they didn't need to wait to receive that last row to
> calculate column widths in such a case.  Do modern browsers
> no longer do this?

To make this work you need to set the table-layout style attribute to
"fixed".  Then browsers know they can start rendering once the first
row has been received.  To be safe put a width on the table and on all
of the cells in the first row.  This works in IE 5 on, and is in the
CSS standards so I'd expect it to work reasonably well.

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Christopher Schmidt
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> For the record, the problem you're trying to solve is probably something
> like 'force rendering of partially complete HTML' or something along
> those lines. (The problem is not strongly related to HTTP or anything
> else.)

I'm sorry but this is entirely wrong if the problem is the time to
generate his document.

In most web environments the document does not start being delivered
to the client until the document is fully present on the server.  This
is needed so that the recommended content size header can be given to
the client.  That means that if his table takes a long time to
generate, then the client won't start seeing anything until the table
is generated.

To avoid this he would need to do a *lot* more work.  First he has to
convince the web server to let him generate all of the headers.  How
to do this varies widely by server and by environment, for instance
for CGI scripts search for "no parse headers".  If there are any
proxies in the way (eg reverse proxies in http accelerator mode - see
http://tinyurl.com/6xx3ct) he will need to bypass them.  And then he
has to generate those headers.  (CGI.pm has some support for this.)

In the process of doing this he will indeed have to get down and dirty
with the details of HTTP.

Cheers,
Ben

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