Loading Order of Items on Page?
October 22, 2008 12:00 AM
In my experience, it seems that the page is meant to load according to the order of the items in the tree view. So, if all you had on the page was a bunch of text blocks, they would simply start loading from the top of the tree to the bottom (which would look pretty instantaneous, since there's virtually no lag time in loading plain text boxes). However, some items naturally take longer than other to load -- for example, graphics take longer than text. So it's not uncommon to see the text for a page appear a split second before the graphical background, for example. If you don't have any layering going on in your page (so the order of the graphics in the tree view doesn't matter), I'd stack them such that the types of objects that take longer to load (like media and graphics) are higher up in the tree view than the simpler objects (like text boxes). I definitely do this when I have two actions to show -- say, a picture with a caption -- I'll generally have the action to show the picture on top of the action to show the text in the tree view. (This makes sense anyway, since, if by some chance they don't end up arriving on the page at the same time, it would make sense to see the picture and then the caption rather then the caption and then the picture.)Laura
Discussions have been disabled for this post