My animated gifs keep stopping

[mike breck]

Hi everyone,

I have just built my first webpage using Word 97.
To spruce it up I have added 15 animated gifs at various points in the page.

However, after I view the page for a minute or so online some of the gifs stop moving or the whole lot grind to a halt.

I have used specific gifs several times in the page.
One animated line is repeated 3 times.
One animated line is repeated twice.
One pulsar (starburst) effect is repeated 9 times.
The rest of the gifs are just used once.
So is the slowdown caused by...

1. There is a limit to how many animated gifs you can use on one web page.

2. Asking too much of one gif file by repeating it on the page. If so, would making 9 copies of the file saved under different names and inserted into each of the 9 positions help.

3. Something else.


Any help would be appreciated as always.

Mike.

[mairving]

Are the gifs still showing on your page? Or do they look like this? <img src="http://www.noway.cat">

Also, never use Word97 as your HTML editor. Either use notepad or one of the free ones. It puts it's own stuff in on the page. I just added 42 animated gif's to a page and they all worked fine. If you page is online, point us to it and we will critique it.

[reboot]

1. No, but in reality, the more you have the slower the page loads. Usually 3 or 4 would be an acceptable limit. Having more than that can cause what's happening to you, but it's your system and your browser causing the problem, not the page.
2. That would cause the browser to try loading even MORE gifs, and surely cause an even greater slowdown, possibly crash.
3. See #1.
Addendum: work97 will surely screw with your HTML code, and royally mess with some browsers. If you must use an editor of some sort, get a good WYSIWYG one, or do like the real coders do, and use notepad.

[mike breck]

Thanks Reboot and Mairving for replies and advice.

I used Word in Office 97 because I wanted this business page up and running quickly. It going to take time for me to work through my HTML books.
I also have FrontPage Express that came with IE 5.5 but found Word easier to use.

In answer to your question Mairving, the gifs all show on the page - some of them just stop moving.
You can have a look @ http://website.lineone.net/~themagicagency/
and tell me what you think is happening.

I have enjoyed putting the page together and so will now invest in a more professional program.

Any suggestions on a good user friendly program (either free or to buy)?

kind regards

mike

[mairving]

You can download free versions of Homesite & Dreamweaver. With Homesite, you really need to know HTML. Actually even if you use MS Frontpage, you should know how to handcode HTML. There are several crash courses out there. One is <a href="http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/">HTML Goodies</A>. HTML is not really that hard to use. I think the best thing that you can learn is how to use tables. I will check your site out later. It probably is a bandwidth problem. Too many images on, too little modem.

[glc]

yeah - I'm on a 40K modem connect - the page loads fairly well but the animations start and stop - and my mouse pointer gets real jerky. I think it's a matter of too many animations or maybe some bad code. Have you tried running your gifs and your code through some kind of optimizer?

[mairving]

Mike, I looked at the HTML code on your page. In spite of using MS Word as your editor, it was not too bad. I even looked at the page in Netscape and it looked okay there also. Mostly the errors encounter were nested error or no starting tags.
Here are some examples of a nesting error &ltfont&gt&ltb&gtNesting Error&lt/font&gt&lt/b&gt . Notice how you start with a font bold but end with a bold font. This can slow down page loading.
An example of a starting tag without an ending tag is like &ltb&gt but no &lt/b&gt to close it.

Cosmetically the page was pretty busy. Too many things going at once but that may be the result that you desired. The weight of the document in spite of all the images wasn't that bad either. Although I think that too many animated gifs can cause problems like you are having. Why don't you cut down on the animated gifs and use some still images instead. Just my two cents worth.

[mike breck]

Thanks Mairving and glc for your advice and time.

Mairving - I have taken on board your suggestions and will have a look at the source code and reduce the animated gifs.
As this was my first page, I had no idea of possibilties or limitations.
However, it is work in progress. I shall learn as I go along.

glc - what is an Optimiser and where can i get one?


Kind regards,


Mike

[glc]

Try http://www.websitegarage.com