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The BBC updated their BBC News mobile website, recently. One of the ways they optimised it for mobile devices was by deferring loading images until after the page has loaded. I haven't looked into how this is done in detail, but they used DIVs for placeholders in the positions where the images will go. For example: <div class="delayed-image-load" data-src="http://static.bbci.co.uk/news/200/media/images/59388000/jpg/_59388680_59388679.jpg"></div> After the page has loaded, the DIV is changed into an IMG element. Clearly, this isn't very semantic, and wouldn't work at all if JavaScript is disabled. But they have a good reason for doing this, which is why I believe there is a need for a way of deferring the loading of images until after the page has been parsed. This could also be applied to other embedded content elements, like IFRAME and OBJECT. The way I think this should be done is by using the DEFER attribute, which would work in the same way as it does in the SCRIPT element.
Lots of pages do this, even for normal web pages. Load (fadein) on scroll. I think there was another bug for this. I believe it's a hint worth having. For painting it'd be nicer to actually have height/width set though.
This bug was cloned to create bug 17842 as part of operation convergence.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the Editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the Tracker Issue; or you may create a Tracker Issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Rationale: This does indeed on the face of it seem like a potentially useful hint to provide. However it won't make the cut for 5.0 — I'm flagging it as LATER so that we are sure to keep it in mind and will be able to return to it, hopefully reasonably soon.
I'm satisfied with this response.