

The Joy of about:blank - thankuz
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/about-blank/

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pavel_lishin
I haven't been keeping up with all the latest HTML developments, but watching
the font change in front of my eyes as the page loaded made me wonder if I was
having a stroke for awhile.

Also, what's with the huge copyright on the bottom?

~~~
throwawaysrrry
the font thing - <http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/> is a
good article on the subject - is it really that stroke-causing, honestly? to
have a font change a bit after the page loads? in the article linked, paul
irish seems to endorse the webkit view that the text should remain invisible
until after the font loads, and then display - anyhoo, tl;dr: yes, it has to
do with using @font-face and firefox and opera displaying unstyled text before
the font file is loaded.

~~~
underwater
The font resource is obviously taking a while to load.

I opened the page in Chrome and page with _just_ the fixed width fonts until
the font finally loaded 30 seconds later. I was wondering if it was some kind
meta-joke about blank pages. All I saw was the text "about:blank" placed
randomly around the page.

I would have much preferred Firefox's behaviour.

~~~
busted
Me too, it was seriously weird. I scrolled around the page for quite a while
trying to figure out the joke before the text finally appeared.

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some1else
Back in the day, when table-based layouts needed content with certain
dimensions to ensure widths and heights in all browsers, I used to rely on an
image with src set to about:blank, instead of the silly 1x1 transparent pixel
spacer.gif technique.

Later on, when I stumbled upon a CSS problem in IE6 where elements wouldn't
show up unless they had a background, about:blank was back to save the day.

It's really like /usr/bin/yes or /dev/null of the web in a way. I really
wanted to read more 'folklore' about it's meaning, rather than an article
about the perils of it's implementation. Now I'll have to start another
Googling odyssey [CMD+T -> about:blank].

Hope they manage to nail it. We're pretty used to slight delays (hiding
elements until they're ready), so an asynchronous callback seems like the way
to go, if it solves things for the FF developers.

Trippy page load btw, looked like some HTML art example from the nineties at
first..

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mr_justin
_That_ page might be the hardest webpage to load.

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yuvadam
Complicated or not, about:blank has, and always will be, my default home page.

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akkartik
Where do all these subtleties ever get used?

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drivebyacct2
I am completely, completely lost. I thought "about:blank" was just a
completely empty page with nothing to render?

~~~
rwmj
I didn't know this before now, but apparently you can attach an onload
(javascript) handler, and then populate the blank page from that.

(Example: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/205087/jquery-ready-
in-a-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/205087/jquery-ready-in-a-
dynamically-inserted-iframe/1555751#1555751))

I believe the question here is whether this event handler runs synchronously
with the new window or iframe opening (causing the opener page rendering to
hang); or fires off a bit later (asynchronously); or apparently in some
browsers whether the event happens at all.

I'm sure someone who knows what they're talking about will correct me where
I'm wrong ...

