Broadwing Fiber cut, El Paso, TX

Wed Jan 24 05:51:57 UTC 2001

On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 08:10:36PM -0800, Sean Donelan wrote:

> The most popular commercial web sites appear to have enough alternate
> paths, so they didn't appear affected.  I did notice a bit of difficulty
> in some banner ads loading, and other web page fillers.  Which leads to
> an interesting problem for web site owners.  Your own content may load
> quickly, but the user will be watching the spinning icon on their web
> browser for a long time.

Most banner ads are of predetermined size, displayed using <IMG> tags with size
attributes, so page rendering can be done before the image has been downloaded.
So, the user should be able to see the content right away, even if the ads take
a while to fill in.

Sites whose ads don't work this way are broken.  HTML ads, of course, can't be
fixed this way, so if your site is pulling HTML ads from an ad server, it
should time out aggressively when the ad server doesn't respond.

-- 
 - mdz