| Browser Tricks |
Note: Fixed tables, the custom favorites icon, improved cache control, and the home page object model will be supported in Internet Explorer 5, but won't hurt users of any downlevel browser.
HTML tables are normally relatively slow to appear, since browsers calculate the size of each cell in the table before beginning to draw it. When you set the CSS2 table-layout property to FIXED, the browser uses the column-width and row-height information in the first row of the table to lay out the table immediately. Fixed tables render progressively, resulting in a significant speed improvement.
Downlevel browsers simply ignore the style attribute, and render the table normally.
Add the fixed-table layout style to your table as shown in the sample below:
<TABLE STYLE="table-layout:fixed"> . . . </TABLE>
Internet Explorer 5 does a better job of respecting the HTTP directive EXPIRES. The EXPIRES directive instructs the browser to get an item from the cache, instead of from the Web server, until such time as the content "expires." Older browsers have performed a roundtrip to the server even when this tag was present. We are proud to say Internet Explorer 5 is "less dumb," and that it respects the EXPIRES setting.
EXPIRES directive can be set either on the server or by using a <META> tag. If you set it on the server, you can set different expiration values for different items in a page. For example, you could expire an ad GIF immediately, so it always comes from the server, while setting the HTML page expiration date in the future so the next time the page is loaded, the text will come from the cache. See your server software documentation for details on how to set HTTP directives on a per-file basis.
The syntax for setting the EXPIRES directive using the <META> tag is as follows:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" value="Tue, 23 Jun 1998 01:46:05 GMT">