Long threads with inline images

[Travis Cobbs]

When threads start getting long and contain a lot of inline images (like this thread), they become really difficult to deal with, particularly when a link from "Recent Messages" is clicked to view a message late in the thread (like this link).

The problem seems to be that the image shrinker is swapping out a placeholder on the fly. So the text that you are looking at is continually being scrolled down off the screen as the images load. Is it possible for the spot where the image is going to end up to have its initial size match its final size after the image is loaded? Note that once you've viewed the thread with images loaded, looking at it again doesn't show the placeholders. I'm not sure if that's because they're cached after generation by the server or what, but it's possible that the behavior I'm describing here won't be visible to others simply because anyone who looks at this thread and clicks the links will make the problem go away for other users.

[Tim Gould]

I suspect that's the wonderful world of the asynchronous in AJAX at work. There are probably ways around it, but they're usually very hard to do. In this case we might be able to use the image dimensions to make sure the size is right even before the image loads. But even that might be unneseccarily delayed.

Tim