[whatwg] Progressive rendering

[Kornel Lesinski]

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 12:43:37 -0000, Michel Fortin  
<michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:

> Just an update on my previous footnote markup proposal. Håkon Wium Lie  
> told me in a private email that it wouldn't work alongside progressive  
> rendering in CSS. From what I understand, it only applies to paged media  
> however.
>
> The problem is that you can't lay out a page until all the footnotes for  
> that page have been found; if footnotes are all at the end of the  
> document -- as in my backward compatible proposal -- then no page with a  
> footnote can be rendered until the footnote content, at the end of the  
> document, has been parsed.

I don't think it breaks progressive rendering, even on paged media.

On each footnote encountered, browser can check:

if (height_of_static_content + height_of_footnote_area > height_of_page)  
break_page();

I'm thinking that footnotes would be flowed independently of normal  
content. Browser would flow normal content from the top of the page, and  
flow footnotes from the bottom of the page at the same time. Break when  
both meet.

The only limitation here is that HTML of footnotes section has to be known  
in advance to compute styles for footnotes, however  
printing-while-downloading seems a bit extreme to me.

-- 
regards, Kornel Lesiński