Friday, December 04, 2009

Things They Should Invent: load content before environment

Especially when using a slow computer or network, I often find myself staring at the header of a website while waiting for the actual content to load. The browser is processing the header and the sidebar and the widgets and the archives and the ads, and I don't care about any of that stuff. I just want to see the content.

So what we need is a new web standard: load content first. This would mean that the space in the template for content would be at the top of the template document, and would then be followed by the headers and sidebar and any in-body style sheets and widgets whatever other detritus is on the page. The result would be that if the page is loading slowly, we'd first see the content in the default font without the surrounding environment, and then the environment would appear as the page loads. Stuff might shift around as the page loads, but at least you could start reading the article right away instead of having to stare at the header while you wait for stuff to load.

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