Inline Image Blocking Suggestion

[Robert Seymour]

While I'm going through my list of wanted features for OmniWeb, here's the  
one that ranks top on my list.  When downloading a page with inline images in  
OmniWeb, the text is first downloaded (a very nice feature notably missing  
from Netsurfer) and then the images are each downloaded is sucession.  When  
the page is displayed before the images are downloaded, each image is  
represented by the generic image icon (NotFetched.tiff in the app wrapper).   
Once the image downloads, the icon is replaced by the image itself.

Now this sounds fine at first pass, but has a very distracting side effect.   
When the image downloads and is rendered as part of the page, the text below  
it jumps suddenly to reposition to the actual dimensions of the image (which  
are usually larger than the icon).  This causes all the text under your  
cursur to jump, so if you are trying to click on a textual link while images  
above it are downloading, you may miss the link or inadvertantly hit another  
as the text jumps.  I have found this to be very distracting, particuarly  
when working on sites with large banner images for which I don't want to wait  
around.

A nice solution implemented by some other browsers is to prefetch the image  
size of all the images while downloading the text.  I can't tell you very  
accurate performance figures, but it appears to not have a substantial impact  
on the time to download the text portion (i.e. the time until the page is  
rendered with the text and generic image icons blocked out to actual  
dimensions).  Using this method one can block off the amount of space  
required by the actual image so that the text positioning will not be  
affected by the download of the actual image and swap of the generic icon for  
the image.  I can't really comment on how hard this would be to implement,  
but I know it would be a big plus for me as a user.  There are some sites  
which I will switch to netscape for becuase of this reason alone.  I still  
think OmniWeb is the most solid and useful of NEXTSTEP browsers, but it has a  
number of quirks such as this which tend to really get under my skin  
sometimes.

Regards, Robert

P.S.	Can anyone tell me what the near term development cycle for OmniWeb is?   
Is a new version expected soon?  If so, what features will it implement?  Is  
now a useful time to rattle off my wish/gripe list for OmniWeb features,  
hoping that they might be implemented (or at least considered) for the next  
coming version?

[ Opinions expressed herein represent those of the author and may not  
correspond to the policies of Swiss Bank Corporation. ]
--
Robert Seymour			 seymour at swissbank.com
Swiss Bank Corporation		 (NeXTMail, MIME, PGP accepted)

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