Flickering Bookmarks in IE

I use bookmarks to navigate inside my pages.

From the current page, say index.html, I refer to a section in a different page as follows:
<a href="chapter2.html#section7">

I refer to a section in the current page like this:
<a href="#section7">

And in my pages I tag these sections using this syntax:

<a name="section7"></a>

This works beautifully in Firefox. However, in IE – and thus in the eBook – it seems that when a section in a different page is loaded, it first loads the new page from the top, and then goes to the specified bookmark. This causes a flickering effect which is rather annoying.

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

It looks very different in IE (6.0; 5.5 and 5.0) than in Firefox.

Try putting a litlle graphic or colorful header at the top of a page (page2.htm) and then link to a subsection of that page from some other page (<a href="page2.htm#section7"> Link text </a>. In IE the header/graphic at the top of page2.htm will flash by ever so quickly before you arrive at the subsection.

This does not happen in Firefox.

In my particular application, this is an issue.
I am thinking that perhaps pages can be preloaded somehow? Or perhaps I have misunderstood the use of bookmarks?

Any thots on the above? Please advice!

My pages are rather simple.

I use plain html, and have a rather complex NAV structure with dropdows based on CSS and Java. THis part works fine, a flickering of the NAV menues upon loading a new page  is OK (not disturbing nor anything to do about it).

It is just the flicjkring of the content area that is disturbing. All looks great when hopping between subsections in the same page.

THought this was inevitable, but Firefox renders these pages much nicer.

Thanks - and looking forward to any notes.

Do you happen to have IE's cache settings set to load on every visit to the page? If so, change it and see what happens.

But even if it did - I'm not so sure the eBook would take notice.

It seems that IE settings are not always used in the eBook. For instance, it seems Java is allowed in my eBooks regardless of any IE settings saying no Java. Likewise the use of cookies seems to be OK.

Is that so? I'll post a  new thread on that - hopefully Sunil will set me straight there.

But I have no ideas on how to address the flickering effect. What did you do? Did it work?

I'm still looking through my notebooks, but seem to recall that giving the container DIV a height had been the solution for flickering NAV that used javascript.

Everything is placed inside a DIV (#wrapper)
This wrapper holds #Nav and #contentwrapper. The DIV #contentwrapper also holds a div #bulktext, which contains the actual content matter. I have it set up this way to make it easy to implement a “fixed” NAV in IE using overflow-auto/hidden.

In essence
<div id="wrapper">

  <div id="contentwrapper">
        <div id="bulktext">
             Good Stuff which flickers in IE upon loading…
        </div>
   </div>

   <div id="NAV">  
         Navigation structure
   </div>
</div>

I already had set height: 100% for all divs. And that is the settings that gives me the “flickers” as per above.

Note: my issue is with the flickering of the content in div #bulktext when going to a subsection of a new page, not the NAV.

Any suggestion on which divs I should set a heigh to?

one simple solution to this flickering issue is to simply put everything in ONE long page. Thus there is no need to hop between pages.

Are there any obvious drawbacks to this?

I realize that for a very long page any vertical scrollbar becomes too small to be useful.

Any more serious problems than that?

Interesting that you bring up scrolling vs. paging. A couple of days ago I had a chance to speak to the owner of one of the largest SEO companies around. His take is that users prefer to scroll than page. At least that is what his research shows.

One thing you might consider is a floating menu that has a list of the topics for that page, then simply link anchors to those topics. Basically, I don't want the customer to ever be confused as to what to do next or how to get where they want to go.

Hence, the issue of "flickering" is still there.