Designing websites for staged loading

[complete]

What I would really like to learn is how to load a page so that it display in parts. In other words, if a website is graphic intensive, it shows one gif at a time as if the page is building infront of the users eyes. This is in contrast to that blank page that users see while the website is being loaded.

[sde]

hi complete,

it's not possible to have that level of control in regards to loading with plain html. you could however do it with AJAX. it would be a pretty complicated solution for the sole purpose of having your page load nicely, but it would work.

on a high level... you would lay out your page with bare bones minimum HTML/CSS, and then use AJAX to perhaps make server requests for the content of the specific areas.

[complete]

Originally Posted by sde

hi complete,

it's not possible to have that level of control in regards to loading with plain html. you could however do it with AJAX. it would be a pretty complicated solution for the sole purpose of having your page load nicely, but it would work.

on a high level... you would lay out your page with bare bones minimum HTML/CSS, and then use AJAX to perhaps make server requests for the content of the specific areas.

I have not jumped into AJAX yet. I guess now would be a good time to start. I have heard buzz about it from here and there. So, where do you recomend I go to start?

[sde]

what server-side language does your web server support? do you have any server-side scripting experience?

php is always my tool of choice. there are AJAX frameworks out there which make your life easier and handle a lot of the repetative tasks as well as optimization for you. a nice light-weight framework for PHP is MyBIC.

if you are the type that likes to know how things work at the lowest level, then i would read up on the XMLHttpRequest object to understand what is really going on behind the scenes in the AJAX frameworks out there.

in short, AJAX is just using JavaScript to get text from another web page. the web page isn't necessarily a traditional web page, but rather XML or text formatted in a format that you can evaluate into a JavaScript object.

[DJMaze]

Ehm, why not look into Comet? It is superior to AJAX.

[sde]

from what i've read, i would argue that comet is a form of AJAX.. no? .. got any good resources for it?