Re: LYNX-DEV Viewing pages as they're downloading

[David Woolley]

> 
> A feature of commercial browsers like Netscape is that they
> display the text (and/or images) while it's downloading,

Actually, generally they don't because most commercial sites use tables
to control physical format and the current GUI browsers need to digest the
whole table before they can render any of it!  However, it is true that
they will do it on well designed pages, and that the HTML 4.0 specs make
it easier to write pages which contain tables and can still be 
incrementally rendered (although I doubt that authors will take advantage).

> which is useful with a very bulky document or a slow link.
> With Lynx one has to wait for the whole thing to be
> retrieved before seeing it. Is there some fundamental

Yes.  I find that annoying, especially as one of the reasons that Lynx
can't do tables is that it uses a one pass renderer, which must mean
that it has done most of the work as soon as the data arrives.  I've
thought of looking at this, but I don't really have the time and
I have other things higher on my priority list for non-work programming.