gbulmash's Journal: Dealing With Slowvertising

I've noticed both on my own pages and on the pages of others (like Yahoo) that sometimes a page will hang mid-render while waiting for a script-sourced ad to fill in a table cell or a div.

I thought this was only a problem on older browsers where the size of the ad/div wasn't specified, but I'm finding that this still happens on the newest browsers with divs and table cells.

As a site-builder and as a user, I'm interested in how to avoid this from both sides: making pages less prone to this when coding them, and finding ways to push the render through as a user when I find myself viewing someone else's page that is stalled halfway and waiting for a response from Google AdSense or another remotely-sourced ad.

Any advice that isn't "don't put ads on your pages", "use an ad blocker", or "only visit sites that don't carry ads"?

Javascript size

[HTH NE1]

Unfortunately, there is no way to pre-specify the render size of a block of javascript other than by the dimensions of its container, so if it has to go inside a table, make sure the table is set so that its size is fully specified (even use COL and COLGROUP tags [w3.org]), and use the table-layout: fixed; [w3.org] style on the table. You may also need to use the overflow and clip properties [w3.org] to fence misbehaving content in.

Page location?

[duguk]

I saw this on the firehose...

Is it not possible to put as many of these adverts at the bottom of your HTML code? Even insert them with javascript after the page is read (as per google ads do, etc, although I realise you can't place this in a region), or even throw them into an iframe so they're loaded later?

Perhaps this should be a thought for those doing HTML design to offer some way of ordering the loading of pages. Obviously this would be a major upheaval of code, and some browsers couldn't support