[thelist] Flickery rollovers are ruining my life

Roger Ly evolt at matchpenalty.com
Mon Oct 4 20:04:09 CDT 2004


>My latest design uses rollover images, and even though I have told the 
>accursed pages in question to preload the rollover images, they often 
>"flicker" as the user mouses over them.  This is *ugly and annoying*.

CK,

With a cursory glance, it looks like each of your mouseover images are
almost 9K in size.  If you were to preload your images when loading the
page, it seems like it would take you 9K x 6 = 54K worth of bandwidth
(plus 6 http connections) to even preload the images.

Any chance that the flickering is happening because the browser hasn't
had a chance preload all the images before they are being requested?
The preloading is happening on a body.onload, which will only get fired
after the page has loaded and is completely visible to the user.  So,
you would expect it to take another few seconds for the mouseover images
to be fully loaded after the user is able to try them out.

Of course, this would probably only apply to slow modem connections, as
my connection doesn't seem to exhibit any flickering at all.

Maybe put in some javascript alerts to let you know if all the images
have even been preloaded before you mouseover the links?  That way you
can eliminate the possibility that the browser is still trying to load
the images in the first place, causing the flicker?

Roger 



More information about the thelist mailing list