Tips for progressive rendering of HTML from locally loaded file?

Question

We're using the customer's default browser to display locally generated HTML files in a preview mode. The files are between 0.5M and 2.5M in size. These files do not progressively render in any of the top 5 Windows browsers (Chrome, FireFox, IE, Opera, and Safari). In other words, when we try to load these files, the browser window displays a blank white page until the page is fully loaded.

The HTML files we generate have no tables or script and have all CSS references in the head section of the HTML file. Our pages include about 10 unique 16x16 png images (with image height and width explicitly included on each img tag) that are referenced several hundred times. Our output validates 100% compliant with XHTML 1.0 Strict using the W3C validation service.

Any tips on how we can enable progressive rendering of LOCALLY loaded HTML files or is progressive rendering a feature that is disabled for locally loaded files?

As an alternative, I'm looking for any tips that would allow us to display a GIF busy indicator graphic while the rest of the file loads and is rendered. We tried doing this by placing a GIF image at the top of our HTML file (immediately following the open body tag) followed by a div with display:none styling that included the full content of the HTML we want rendered. Unfortunately, the GIF file does not display until the full HTML file is loaded.

Thank you, Malcolm

Answer 1

I can suggest that you confirm that the content is being interpreted properly by the browser. Despite the W3C checks, things could still be handled in 'quirks mode' .. In my experience, 'xhtml-transitional' has proved to be the most likely to provide cross-browser zen. Also, confirm that major tags like 'div' and 'p' are being closed quickly. It's hard for the browser to know what to do if the whole page is always in one layer of 'div' ..

Good luck! Tim