Customizing ProductCart - Displaying text before images in IE

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Displaying text before images in IE

Printed From: ProductCart E-Commerce Solutions
Category: ProductCart
Forum Name: Customizing ProductCart
Forum Description: Exchange messages with other users that are customizing ProductCart.
URL: https://forum.productcart.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=1765
Printed Date: 23-June-2025 at 10:37pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: Displaying text before images in IE

Posted By: BNC4477
Subject: Displaying text before images in IE
Date Posted: 26-June-2008 at 11:27pm

Most of the ProductCart programs work pretty well in this regard. When using Internet Explorers 6 and 7, the screens are displayed in a manner where the text and other non-image content appear on the screen before the images do. This can be very important for dialup users when you have ProductCart screens with several pictures on them, as the screen will display several seconds before all the images show up. Both the main menu program (home.asp) and the View Categories program (viewcat.asp) do this just fine.

However, one of the most frequently used programs does not work this way -- the one where you view individual products (viewprd.asp). The screen data will not display until ALL of the images have been loaded, creating delays of several seconds.

Anyone familiar with this situation? We would like to modify the viewprd.asp and associated programs (as little as possible) to make this feature of IE work for this part of ProductCart. We run version 3.051a of the standard ProductCart. Any help in this area would be greatly appreciated. In particular, what is causing it to work this way and how we can modify it to make it work like the other ProductCart programs.

Replies:

Posted By: Tim
Date Posted: 28-June-2008 at 2:37am

It's extremely weird that you posted such an obscure question only one day before I had the exact same question myself! :)

I too want to know more about how to do this. PC load time is adversely affected by pre-loading images on product detail and also my custom homepage. To be more specific, I've got a page weight of around 175k on my product detail page and it takes longer to appear than a product detail page weighing 388k from walmart.com. It's clear that walmart and some other retailers have optimized their code to display lightweight items immeadiately and then load heavier elements following that. It's been forever since I've tackled such dev challenges, so I forget what little knowledge I used to have regarding manipulation of browser rendering speed and order via markup/coding.

However, I wish to ask this in the greater context of "What are best practices and tips on optimizing PC for load time / performance?"

As we speak, I am searching through threads to uncover this information. Should I fail to find it, I will start a separate thread to gather this info within.

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Tim Salam
Stuffington Bear Factory
~Teddy Bears Made in the USA~
http://www.stuffington.com/

Posted By: BNC4477
Date Posted: 28-June-2008 at 1:33pm

Good news, Tim! I found the culprit. Program viewprd.asp, look for the statement:

It needs to be moved to just before the statement:

Apparently the AJAX code cannot be in the midst of the table if you want the text to be rendered before the images are displayed in IE. ProductCart did this correctly in their menu program home.asp. Hopefully EI will implement this in a future release.

Posted By: Tim
Date Posted: 30-June-2008 at 11:53am

Very cool, I will try this out and report back results.

Many thanks to you!

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Tim Salam
Stuffington Bear Factory
~Teddy Bears Made in the USA~
http://www.stuffington.com/

Posted By: Tim
Date Posted: 30-June-2008 at 12:13pm

Nice, it seems to work just as you describe. Now, product detail pages load slightly quicker with images loading in beyond the rendering of the HTML file. Still slow, but for some other reasons. This got me an important step closer though.

Much appreciated, thanks much!

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Tim Salam
Stuffington Bear Factory
~Teddy Bears Made in the USA~
http://www.stuffington.com/

Posted By: BNC4477
Date Posted: 30-June-2008 at 1:00pm

Tim -- Also take a look at program compression. There's a lot to be gained by compressing certain programs and css tables. One program used in product display, viewprdcode.asp, was reduced in size by over 30K. A good compression program like Web Site Maestro can be purchased for around $30, with a 30 day free trial. Also, avoid comments in HTML code as they get transmitted over the phone lines, whereas comments written in ASP do not.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Posted By: Tim
Date Posted: 30-June-2008 at 1:05pm

Very good tips. I will take a look at the compression. I wonder if this is considered "ok" with EI or would they regard this as an unrecommended method? Forgive me, I'm not well versed in the finer details of programming (I know enough to be dangerous) so I'm not aware of how compression is regarded in general as it relates to programming.

As for commenting, I think our HTML comments are pretty lightweight but I will review the css files (I trust the same rule applies there). Interesting factoid about .asp comments not being transmitted, didn't know that.

Many thanks,

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Tim Salam
Stuffington Bear Factory
~Teddy Bears Made in the USA~
http://www.stuffington.com/

Posted By: Hamish
Date Posted: 30-June-2008 at 2:10pm

Hi Tim,
Two key things :
- I'm sure all these compression programs preserve the original version of the code in a separate directory, or rather, write the new version to an alternative set of directories. Double check though :-)
- I would also assume that the compressed version will be fairly or completely unreadable, so one, minor, consideration is that if you ever need external support and that third party (EA or whomever) needs to access the files via FTP then they will only get to the mangled versions. That's easily dealt with though & a rare occurance.

None of the ASP code is sent to the browser, comments included. The ASP code does all it's magic at the server end.

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Editing ProductCart Code?

See http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/developers/editcode" rel="nofollow - WIKI Guidelines for Editing ProductCart's ASP Source Code