'Delivering' HTML

[paulnaj]

Has anyone got any good tips on delivering HTML to the browser (with PHP of course)?

The problem I'm having is this ... however fast the page get's delivered back to the browser, there's always a 'white-out'.

I've got a real mix of static bits and dynamic bits mixed up. So far, I've tried having lots of PHP tags in HTML ... that didn't seem good ... actually caused display problems sometimes.
Now I'm doing all in PHP echo statements. I pretty much build big strings and print 'content areas' all in one chunk.

It might be the way the page is designed ... using tables. Although it's not the now-preferred method, it is almost brower-universal. Might have to change to css-positioned layers.

Anyone got any comments, suggestions?

Cheers,
Paul.

[swr]

It could be due to tables. Most browsers have a hard time incrementally rendering tables, especially nested tables.

Adding width and height attributes (in pixels) to every element you can may help.

At least, that used to be good advice... I haven't really looked at the problem in a few years though.

I suggest looking around at sites that do load fast, and figure out what the difference is.

[paulnaj]

Thanks ... I had thought it might be that ... but had hoped that there might be some other optimisations I could make before having to change to some other layout method.

Which method do you use?

Cheers,
Paul.

[Moonglobe]

firebird handles incrementally parsing tables perfectly, and who cares about anything else 😉

but really, if you have the time and energy, and your server has it intalled i'd look into the [man]xslt[/man] extension.

[paulnaj]

Ah, if only, ... trouble is, most of my customers are a mix of Win-IE (mostly 6), Mac-IE (most at the moment) and now Mac-Safari (gaining on IE).

Thanks anyway.