Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn said the following on 5/29/2006 7:43 AM:
Yes there is.
Because with regard to display performance, such attempts at preloading
at first _decrease_ that performance in favor of the /generally/ less
likely event that exactly the preloaded content is accessed later.
I suppose you use that same argument to tell people not to pre-load
images? It is a flawed argument. Trying to preload the next page does
not decrease the display performance for the current page if it is
implemented correctly and uses the browsers "down time" for making HTTP
Requests to the server.
Believe it or not, users /like/ incremental display.
That has nothing to do with the question. It wasn't about trying to
speed up the current page, it was about trying to speed up the
transition from one page to the next.
And no, users do not like to wait. Given the same exact content/pages,
if a user is confronted with two scenarios:
Scenario 1: Pages flow seemlessly, no wait.
Scenario 2: User has to wait for the next page to load.
The user will inevitably use the first page more often.
The obvious reason is that they can see, and possibly use, the top
of the content /before/ the bottom is loaded.
That wasn't the issue. Please read it carefully again.
Don't get me wrong: This is not to say preloading is a Bad Thing.
Huh? Even in this one post you are contradicting yourself. You say
trying to preload decreases performance and argue against it, then you
say it isn't a bad thing. Make up your mind please.
It is certainly useful (iff it works, you have no control over the cache
features) if a dynamic effect needs to work regardless of known timing
issues. But such /excessive/ preloading as you want it, is nonsense.
"excessive preloading"? WTF are you smoking? Trying to preload one image
and an HTML file is *not* "excessive preloading" by *any* stretch of the
imagination.