[whatwg] Progressive rendering

[Henri Sivonen]

On Nov 6, 2006, at 15:44, Alexey Feldgendler wrote:

> On Sun, 05 Nov 2006 03:32:55 +0600, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi>  
> wrote:
>
>>> It's not only about printing-while-downloading. It's about the  
>>> ability to print an arbitrarily long document without consuming  
>>> infinite memory for DOM.
>
>> What kind of use is this about? Is this about XHTML-Print-type  
>> stuff or about Prince-type high-end formatting? CSS already allows  
>> page number references, which means that the formatter has to  
>> paginate the whole document in order to make forward reference by  
>> page number.
>>
>> I have never seen the source of a print-only CSS formatter, but I  
>> imagine an optimized implementation could optimize away the DOM  
>> but would still have to keep the entire CSS frame tree in memory  
>> (at least when there's generated content that depends on later  
>> page numbers).
>
> TeX uses repeated passes over a long document to handle cross- 
> references properly using limited memory. It would be useful if  
> HTML allowed something like that.

I see streaming bounded-memory operation and multiple passes as two  
totally different things. Making multiple passes on something stored  
on disk isn't streaming operation. It is more like an application- 
specific virtual memory. Even if it was bounded in terms of RAM, it  
isn't bounded in terms of disk.

Do you have specific real apps in mind?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/