[whatwg] Progressive rendering

[Alexey Feldgendler]

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.


-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com