I miss progressive loading GIFs. They make me pine for compuserve, but also make be a smart way to render state in the DOM. I've noticed that all of these front end frameworks, while fricken fantastic at managing state at scale, do a terrible job at UX while dom elements are loading. The best sites have animated png/svg spinners that indicate to the user that the page, or better yet, the page's element they don't have yet hasn't loaded. The worst... well you think the site is basically a static header and altogether broken until your poor browser manages to piece together all those diffs and finally renders some content. Hopefully before the user has left.
Can DOM elements get their headers streamed before their content? Can we bring back the progressively loading GIF but with state???
I see that as a big potential win for usability. If I knew I was waiting around for 3 seconds to have somebody's twitter feed load, I would simply move on to the part of the content I needed. I DON'T need to see their press releases in full. Maybe the first one...
If state could have relative weight to the user and could be loaded in a smart sort order, we would be able to browse the web with high fidelity when we want, and speed when we don't.
This seems to fit nicely into a personalized web experience, but could just as easily work well for a standard anon user based on aggregated usage habits.
I'm rather inclined to build something like this because I needs it, but if this exists in any form, please lmk where to find it.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2005/12/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776fcadb970c-pi.gif
