Slow Logos

I've noticed the four logos at the bottom of each Wiki page often cause the page refresh to either slow or pause altogether. Often, the rest of the page will have loaded properly, and when I finally hit the "Stop" button (in Netscape), the new page will refresh without the graphics at the bottom.

Does this happen to anyone else?

I'm not sure whether this is a problem on my end or Ward's.

As far as I can see, there are no logos at the bottom of this page. There's only the small (700 bytes) Wiki Logo at the top left.

The logos are those of SisterSites that have similarly named pages. Some browser drawing engines will stall while the images are retrieved, though this should happen only the first time the particular logo is encountered at this site.

The rendering engines stall while images are retrieved because of page layout requirements. None of the images on Wiki have height or width properties, so your web browser must wait until it has the images and can decode them enough to know their size before it can finalise the page layout and render it completely. Some later browsers will do a fair job of laying out the page and then reflow when the images are available, but the best way to improve the user's experience of responsiveness is to add code to the img tags in the html that specifies the actual height and width of each image; the browser will then lay out the page with boxes for the images as soon as it has the full page. Also, if the images fail to load in some way, for example if they are being retrieved from another server that is down and timing out, the page will still appear just as quickly, and the boxes will get the "broken image" icon when the request finally times out. For example, see http://jeffglover.com/ss/extra01.php -- StevenNewton

Couldn't those images be cached on the server side (if they aren't already)? In particular, since RecentChanges will be present on every Wiki, it seems like the SisterSite logos will be requested at least once for every Wiki user.

It also seems to happen while attempting to load the Wiki logo at the top of this page.

I'm wondering if the firewall I'm going through is trying to magic with images (like make sure they're not pornographic or something). Something is making the gifs much slower than the rest of the page.

Ironic the icon for Wiki, which means "quick", is slow. Maybe put up an icon for "slow" and you may then get quick response.

One way to fix this is to suppress all images for this site (since WardsWiki is not image heavy). MozillaBrowser does this through the following command: Tasks Menu -> Privacy & Security -> Image Manager -> Block Images from this site. Mozilla Browser tends to load quicker than InternetExplorer (for me anyway) because it renders the page on the fly, adjusting layout as elements are loaded.

Thanks, that's good to know.

It would seem, though I haven't conclusively demonstrated it yet, that my client's firewall is filtering all images (it also blocks every url that contains "mp3", regardless of context). Since some get through, there is presumably some sort of caching/recording going on. This appears to be another illustration of the reactionary corporate behavior described so well in CluetrainManifesto. So it would seem that the performance problems are on my end, not Wiki's. -- TomStambaugh