A total waste of bandwidth

[hobbit]

Normally I read with a text-only browser, so I hadn't noticed
this before. But in a graphic environment, I loaded a priuschat
page and then noticed that it never *stopped* loading, even
though the whole page was displayed. Here's why.
.
One page component is
http://priuschat.com/forums/images/m...11progress.gif
which gets handed out with these HTTP headers:
.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:18:09 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.7a mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
Last-Modified: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 04:21:55 GMT
ETag: "a281b6-219-45851ac68fec0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 537
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Connection: close
Content-Type: image/gif
.
The combination of the expiry time and the cache-control line causes
a browser to reload 11x11progress.gif, over and over and over and over
until you manually stop the load. There is no delay on this, it
happens as fast as the browser and intervening network can do it.
.
If we must have this relatively useless "progress spinny", please
lose the screwed-up caching stuff so it loads only once. It's already
a self-looping animation [which, by the way, should have at least
*some* minimal delay time added other than 0ms]. Or just eliminate
it entirely, because frankly it comes up in a completely irrelevant
part of a page and I can't even see what it's supposed to be indicating.
.
_H*

[qbee42]

Yea, it's a great piece of coding, isn't it? You have to wonder who writes code like this.

Tom

[firepa63]

If I have to "Rollover to see the power of the sun" one more time, I'm only going to visit PriusChat at night...!

[Helio]

Brother! The Power of the Sun! I get it already!

[Helio]

I don't think I'm having that endless 'loading' with Google Chrome, I have noticed that with Mozilla though.

[Rae Vynn]

What I hate is the intermittent hijacking of my posting. I'll post a reply, and what loads is JUST the ad banner. That's it. Nothing else. It spins forever. I have to hit the back button to get back to the main page.

The power of the sun banner just p***es me off. Continually.

[hyo silver]

I haven't seen that sun ad in quite awhile. I get one advertising a 'Pontaic Montana' No that's not my typo, it's in the ad. "Buy our car and we'll give you cash back!" How stupid do they think people are?

[Danny]

H* - I have no idea what the code even means, so I'll take a look into it and see what I can find out.

Regarding the Sharp ads, they are only through the end of this month...

[Danny]

It looks like it's an image that is loaded for the tag bar at the top of the thread for when you edit them. When you were browsing on the graphic browser that you were using, did you have javascript enabled? The progress icon is connected to a javascript AJAX call, and if you have JS disabled, perhaps that is causing the reload.

I don't have any continuous load problems on my browser.

[Danny]

Of course now it has started doing it to me...