Banner jumps from middle to top of screen

I have recently changed the design of www.trec-uk.org.uk to make more
use of tables so that text is contained within fixed-width areas.

Since I have made the change, a new problem has appeared. It quite
often happens that, when a page is first loaded, the banner heading
for the page is shown half way down the screen and then, after about a
second, it jumps to its proper position at the top of the screen. Once
the page has been cached, this does not happen.

Can anyone suggest the reason for this problem and how it may be
cured?

With thanks.

On Apr 5, 2:00 pm, Lars Eighner <use... (AT) larseighner (DOT) com> wrote:

In our last episode,
1ac205db-da41-430a-83ad-768d82ab2... (AT) x41g2000hsb (DOT) googlegroups.com>, the
lovely and talented JGW1 broadcast on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:

I have recently changed the design ofwww.trec-uk.org.ukto make more
use of tables so that text is contained within fixed-width areas.
Since I have made the change, a new problem has appeared. It quite
often happens that, when a page is first loaded, the banner heading
for the page is shown half way down the screen and then, after about a
second, it jumps to its proper position at the top of the screen. Once
the page has been cached, this does not happen.
Can anyone suggest the reason for this problem and how it may be
cured?

First, you did not declare a DOCTYPE. Chose a DOCTYPE and validate you
document against it. The abscence of a DOCTYPE causes the browser to treat
your document as "tag soup" --- which given your mix of deprecated
attributes, deprecated elements, and table makeup is probably an accurate
description of what you have got. In any event, in "tag soup" (aka "quirks"
mode), your browser will not trust your document until it has downloaded all
of the parts. You may have a valid Transitional document, but without the
DOCTYPE neither I nor the browser can tell what you are aiming at.

(Well, opps, no you do not. You have 32 errors even with the Transitional
DTD.)

When the browser is set to show pages while downloading, instead of only
when the when the page is completely received.

Typically, the browser will begin downloading several of the source files at
once and will start displaying the various graphics etc. as it receives
them.[1] But if the browser does not know how much space to allocate for an
element above or how big a graphic, etc. is going to be or doesn't really
trust the document because it is in quirks mode, its placement of the things
it is showing during downloading is just a guess. It cannot make up the
page in its final form until the loading is complete.

[1] Display while downloading can be turned of in many/most/all browsers,
but of course you cannot count on users having it turned off in their
browsers especially as it is usually on by default.

--
Lars Eighner <http://larseighner.com/> use... (AT) larseighner (DOT) com
Countdown: 290 days to go.

Many thanks!

Gerry