Weird Google chrome image bug - css

I can't seem to find an answer to this rather interesting problem. In google chrome, images that have a set width and/or height, either using attributes, inline styling or css styling, refuse to show up on the page on initial load. They only seem to appear after there has been some page activity. Yet, if you let the images load to their natural size they display on page load perfectly fine. The images can be seen as it works in other browsers and when inspecting elements in chrome the image is display in the popup window.
Any know how to fix this?

define what you mean by: 'after some page activity'.
You also mentioned that the it happens when you have set width AND/OR height which leads me to believe in some of your testing your ommiting width OR height so it can be calculated by the browser. if that is the case then yes the image will never look proper and the elements will have no size on initial page load UNTIL the image is downloaded, the browser inspects the image and determines the dimensions missing to create the bounding box.
Edit:
After looking at your online site, my previous comment explains the gist of it but I can see that you're setting a width of 'auto' which requires the browser to load the image first and detect the sizes. Which will cause a delayed 'reflow' in the browser rendering. Set your widths and heights otherwise they will need to calculated by the client browser. And if you have not so good pc it looks sluggish. On my system if i hard refresh with no cache sometimes i get all the thumbs and other times I don't and the delay is very noticeable.
So in short make your images always have a width AND height.
Edit:
You also have some 404 errors that can cause some latency. http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120725_0C_3N6/1/details/
Edit:
I think your only option is to load the bg image first by getting it higher up in the order of resources downloaded so it loads in as fast as possible to be rendered.
One trick might be to load the bg image in a hidden div to preload it right away so the browser downloads it first. And even if you do that you should expect to see some flash of black background while you wait for the high res shot to download and get loaded. Can't set widths and heights on background images anyways. Going further you can speed up the response time maybe by loading all the thumbnails with an AJAX call AFTER page loads so they don't even compete with the big photo shot and start downloading until the dom is fully loaded. You can even put a nice effect in there to maybe fade in the thumbnails loading or something to that effect.

Related

Slideshow Image not scalling with browser window

I have a slideshow in my website that will not scale to the browser.
What happens: When the browser is reduced to 414 px it renders
correctly. When I drag the browser window larger the slideshow image
size remains the same. Refreshing the browser makes it render correctly.
Also during the increase in browser size it's not a smooth transition.
You can see it here. http://comrefhvac.com
Thank you in advance.
RichM
How to fix the issue is a different question, and one that requires that we look at your code. If you simply want to know why, then it's because the styling for the slideshow is dynamically applied via javascript and it looks like the author of the plugin only considered the initial page load and no the window.resize event.
I'm cool with that. Try this, go to my website then take the browser down to 414 px and you will see a gap between the slideshow and the text below. Then refresh the page and it will render as it should. Then maximize the browser and you will see that the slideshow container does not expand to the proper size which is set in my css at 440 x 800 px. Thanks for being honest, hope your head doesn't hurt this AM Jeff. RichM

100% Heights vs Browser Zoom

I've looked and there doesn't appear to be another post the is exactly what I am looking for, and I am on a deadline to make this work so lets see if I can explain it better.
We have one page in development on a Drupal site that uses Panels and Views Slideshow. There are a lot of absolute and fixed position elements because of where they need to be on the page. The parent div needs to have a width and height of 100% to fill the page. Keeping in mind that the point of this page is to not have scrollbars and present everything to the user no matter what screen size they are on. So I have media queries cleaning up elements where need be on certain screen sizes.
Though when a user uses their browser to zoom into the page, the elements start shifting and stacking on top of each other. I believe this is because the 100% height/width is adhering specifically to the window size and doesn't expand beyond the window when a user zooms in.
I was able to fix it by removing the 100%'s and replacing them with pixels, but this becomes an issue because if the screen isn't the correct height or width, then you have scrollbars and the user doesn't immediately see everything on the page.
Is there any JavaScript or anything that can utilize the 100% height/width and allow them to expand beyond the page, and turn on scrollbars, during Browser Zoom?
Keep in mind that if a user is zooming in, its OK for the page to spill off and scrollbars to show, but the default screen this is not allowed.
I hope this is OK to show but an example of a page that uses Javascript to scale the entire page is pretty much what I can see myself needing but don't know how.
http://www.ammunitiongroup.com/
Any help appreciated and the quicker the better of course :)
This should help. Lets you detect the browser zoom level in mordern browsers.
https://github.com/yonran/detect-zoom
Example page:
http://htmldoodads.appspot.com/dimensions.html

Temporary background image while the big one is loading?

Is there a way, without javascript, to load a small image for a background before the real image is downloaded? Without javascript because I know how to do it with it.
I can't test if the following CSS3 would work because it works too quick:
body {
background-image:url('hugefile.jpg'), url('tinypreload.jpg');
}
If the tinypreload.jpg is only, say 20k, and the hugefile.jpg is 300k -- would this accomplish the task? I assume that both downloads would start at the same time instead of being consecutive.
Update
Timing the results using Firefox's profiling revealed that it's not practical / not worth it to load a smaller background first. Main reason is the connection time. For tiny pictures it's the same time to connect as it is to download the content. For images where this becomes worth it -- the file size is not recommended for mobile.
If you still want to achieve this effect - combine all your "necessary" images into 1 file and display them as cropped background with correct offset. Load your high-res images through javascript, and update the content afterward.
You could exploit css load order and overrides to achieve this result.
Try loading the small image from your main css file and then put a <style></style> tag at the bottom of the html page. The inline style will override the main style but will load last because of it's position in the code.
The difference would be milliseconds though, so it may be too quick. It's also hacky and would result in invalid, but working code. Worth a shot though.
If you're trying to fix a mobile problem then have a look at this article on context specific images as that might be a more effective way to go.
This article on CSS3 multiple backgrounds may also help, as you may be able to exploit the stacking order to achieve the result you're after
It would be useful to know what problem you are trying to solve beyond load order, as it's hard to give advice on this one.
As I said in my comment you can use the 'net' tab in firebug for firefox (called timeline in chrome) to see the actual load order on your page - you can even filter it (on firefox) for CSS only or images only - this will enable you to test.

Defining img tag without height and width

The w3c specification says that the width and height are implied and not required. I have always been told that you're supposed to put it in anyway. If I remember correctly his reason was that the browser may not correctly detect the image size. Is this true?
It harkens back to the dark days of Netscape in the v4 and older versions. The rendering engines were primitive and wouldn't "reflow" content as they built pages and figured out sizes. If you didn't specify an image size, the whole page's rendering would get paused (or a full-page refresh would get pulled) once the image was downloaded and parsed for height/width. This looked bad from a user perspective, so the rule was to ALWAYS specify a size.
Nowadays, engines are better, and can handle an unspecified image size gracefully. Reflowing content is still a somewhat expensive operation, but does look cool from a user perspective as things glide/flow around as images pop in and text shifts to accomodate them.
The reason is that if you do not put them in, the browser will put a default size in, download the image, find the actual size then have to re-flow everything around the new size.
Re-flows are expensive operations - the rendering on screen has to be updated for each such image.
If you provide the size, the browser puts in a placeholder with the correct size and doesn't have to re-flow once the image downloads.
In my experience, not supplying width and height tags will cause the browser to render the image at its original size.
I've found this behaviour to be consistent in modern browsers.
As an aside, I always try to supply images at the size I want them rendered at in order to reduce the amount of bandwidth used and to ensure image quality.
I'm not sure about browsers not detecting it correctly, I've never seen that happen.
But to answer your question, I think the answer depends more on what you are trying to do, and possibly likely to do, which makes the difference.
For example, if the image you are adding is a banner ad which needs to conform to predetermined height/width, then by all means, hard code the height and width.
But if the image is something that might change over time, I would suggest NOT coding the height and width, as more than likely this means that the new image, if not the same exact height/width as the old one, will now be distorted. This is especially true on a dynamic website where images change all the time.

Can I disable Firefox' image scaling with CSS on a per image basis?

There are two occasions on my web page where I don't want Firefox to automatically scale the images when zooming in and out.
Can I circumvent this feature on these images specifically, and have the rest of the images zoom as normal in Firefox (if that's what the users has set in his/her preferences)?
There is no way to mark or otherwise prevent an image from being zoomed when the user requests zooming.
You could use window.onresize and detect the zoom amount using one of the techniques described at Detecting Page Zoom in Firefox 3 (And Others). Once you know the zoom amount, you could apply that percentage adjustment to the images you want to leave at a fixed size.
The whole thing is a house of cards though. The JavaScript-only solution does not detect zoom amount when the page is first loaded, so you'll need a Flash component on the page just to detect the zoom amount. Also, the actual effect of the zooming will be jarring for the user. The image resizing will lag slightly behind the user's zoom setting, causing the page to reflow, possibly moving the content they were trying to zoom in on in the first place.

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