[wp-hackers] Advantage (or not) of hosting badges

[Otto]

On 7/2/07, Computer Guru <computerguru at neosmart.net> wrote:
> Does that really happen? JavaScript is different from images - while the JS
> may hold down the page until it loads, I was under the impression the
> browser would just continue to (attempt) to load the images in the
> background until they succeed  - without reflecting on render times....

Images can, and will, stop page rendering in some browsers *if* the
exact size of the image is not specified beforehand. Back in the day,
this meant width and height attributes on the img tag.

Nowadays, browsers tend to be smarter and they also use CSS for that
sort of thing. If the containing DIV is fixed in size, then it'll
render while the image loads without trouble. Or if the width of the
space is fixed, then the image height is just going to push the
content down it down uniformly, so it'll render along happily and just
do a big block shove down when it loads.

But in the case where the rendering of the page depends on the image
size, and there's no hints for it to figure it out, yeah, images can
still stop page rendering. It's more likely to happen with javascript,
mind you, but images can indeed do it.

Solution: If an image is giving you page load fits, give it an ID or
find the surrounding div or something and explicitly specify a width
and height. See if that makes it stop doing it.