I am having a bit of a problem with Netscape 4.7, as always. I am generating all of the content for my website dynamically from an Access 2000 database, using ASP. The site is www.onehouse.net. It works beautifully on IE 5 and Netscape 6, but on netscape 4.7 I am experiencing long delays before the browser will display the pages. The length of the delay seems to be directly proportional to the amount of dynamic content I am attempting to feed into the page.

I have scowered the Macromedia UltraDev technotes and have found nothing on this latency issue. Is this a problem others have experienced? Any suggestions of possible solutions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

In theory, the web browser should make no difference, the page is generated from dynamic content at the web server and sent to the clients browser as plain HTML. Having said that I have noticed that when I'm testing locally with Netscape 4.08 pages are very slow to load compared with IE 6.0 which is almost instantaneous, however they are roughly the same when the site is uploaded to the web.

Incidentally I looked at your site with Netscape 4.08. The home page loads OK but the text is default browser text, when you apply a CSS class NN 4.08 ignores it if applied to the <td> or <tr> tag you have to apply it to the span e.g.
<span class="MyText">Foo, foo, foo</span>

When I try to look at the next page "TEAM" it crashes the browser. <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile_shock.gif border=0 align=middle>

There must be something in the HTML or the JavaScript (or something client side) that Netscape doesn't like. On my own site I gave up trying to get everything to work in Netscape and in the end detected the browser and redirected early browser users to a simplified version of the site with less features.

Regards

Owen.

Multiple Parameter UD4 / Access 2000 Database Search Tutorial:
www.tdsf.co.uk/tdsfdemo

<font face='Verdana'>Owen,

Thank you for responding! I have trudged on and gained a bit more insight into the problem. I stripped the page of all the dynamic content, and tested just the client side code. The page launched in Netscape 4.7 in no time flat.

The problem seems to exists in the pages with repeat region code. The pages that have dynamic content, but no repeat region, like my homepage, seem to load fairly fast. Other pages like my team or services section, that have a repeating region, seem to be the problem areas, taking forever to load in Netscape 4.7 (up to one minute - ouch!).

I noticed that the table structure for the repeat region was a bit more complicated than it needed to be, but simplifiying the table structure, while it did reduce the amount of time the page was taking to load, it didn't really solve the problem. For example, the services section still takes almost 30 seconds to load.

The strange thing is that I created a shopping cart site a while back with a repeat region that works fine in Netscape 4.7. The main difference between that site and my current problem site is that with the current site I am generating a larger amount of content in the repeat region, and I am formating content using basic HTML tags in the database.

Does this sound to you like an especially problematic workflow? Well, let me restate - clearly it is problematic, do you have any ideas why that might be?

Thanks for any insight you might be able to provide.

Nescape challenged,

Elliot</font id='Verdana'>

Strange, I've used repeat regions without any Netscape problems, how "big" is the completed page at the client side (Right-Click &gt; Properties). I aim to keep things under 40k. Could you reduce the number of repeats and have more on an additional page? I have noticed that if you have an unavoidably large page, over 60k, that IE seems to load it much quicker than Netscape.

Repeating tables can quickly ramp up the size of the page, where posible I try to achieve the layout with line breaks and non-breaking-spaces.

Also you mention that you are storing HTML in the database, is it possible to to store just the text in the database and place it in HTML allready on the page? I'm not sure whether this will make a difference, but it might be worth a try.

Good Luck

Owen.

<font face='Verdana'>Owen,

Thanks for the suggestions. This is really turning out to be a wierd problem. I checked the final page size of my services page after the dynamic content had been filled in, and it weighed in at 44k.

I also tried pulling out the HTML formatting in the database, and this had no effect on how long the pages are taking to diplay in Netscape 4.7.

I guess the best short term solution is as you suggested - limit the amount of repeats per page, and allow people to navigate through the recordset.

Thanks for all of your advice. I will let you know if I eventually figure out what I am doing that is offending Netscape 4.7 so much.

Cheers,

Elliot</font id='Verdana'>

<font face='Verdana'>Owen,

I managed to figure out what the problem was!

I tried getting rid of all of the client side code on the page and just displaying the dynamic repeat region. This worked fine in Netscape 4.7. The page displayed in no time. Then, on the complete page, I tried moving the dynamic repeat region from its spot in the page's table structure to the bottom of the page, below the page's table stucture. Essentially, I separtated the client side code from the dynamic code on the same page. To my supreme frustration, this also displayed in Netscape 4.7 in no time!

What I eventually figured out was that there was a series of nested tables holding the repeat region, and Netscape 4.7 was getting bogged down with the complexity of them. It seemed to have less to do with the actual complexity of the individual tables and more to do with the sheer number of tables being used to hold the repeat region section combined with the repeat region code. As I mentioned before, the other pages on my site without repeat region code seemed to work fine in Netscape 4.7 with this same system of nested tables. So the problem has something to do with dynamically repeating a region being held in a complex system of nested tables.

I reworked the portion of the page holding the dynamic content so that it was being held by a less complex system of tables, and the pages now load in 4 to 5 seconds in Netscape 4.7. Not spectacular, but much better than one minute load times!

Thanks, Owen, for all your advice on this subject.

Cheers,

Elliot</font id='Verdana'>

Well done, I took a look with Netscape 4.08 again and the TEAM page no longer crashes the browser - sorted.

However some of the pages still appear in default text which is screwing up the layout (see my note about applying CSS to the span in my first post).

Here's what I mean:

<img src="www.tdsf.co.uk/Images/Site.gif" border=0>

Hope that helps.

Owen.