Hi.  I'm a novice at PHP, so I frequently need to refer to your online 
manual at www.php.net

Unfortunately on my non-mainstream browser -- Netsurf, running on 
RiscOS -- the pages at PHP.net are sooooo paiiiiinfully slooooow to 
render.  If the page is lengthy, it takes ages to scroll.

Curious, I asked the Netsurf developers what mechanism might be 
causing the unusual sluggishness.

They investigated and replied:

     It's because of this SVG being used as a tiled background on 
     the HTML element:    http://php.net/images/bg-texture-00.svg

     Since it's an SVG it bypasses all the optimisations we have 
     [in Netsurf] for tiled bitmap redraw.

     It also isn't a filled rectangle, it's just strokes, so it 
     doesn't get "knocked out" by our normal rendering 
     optimisations.

     Finally it uses opacity, which wouldn't help either, 
     although I think we ignore that anyway for now.

     It could potentially be optimised by pre-rendering it once 
     to a bitmap, but it would be a fair amount of effort for 
     what is a pretty uncommon case.

     For now, I'd try just toggling background images off in the 
     menu for that window, and forcing a redraw.

That final suggestion works here, sort-of, but has to be applied again 
and again.

I tried viewing the PHP.net pages from Firefox and Chrome on Windows 
and Android devices.  Must admit that your background, if it displays 
at all, is hard to notice!  Is my eyesight missing something?

Dare I suggest to the PHP.net webmasters that you simply dispense with 
the SVG background?  Is it really worth while?

Thanks for listening.  Best wishes from this niche.  (And I am 
enjoying my forays into PHP.)

-- 
Jim Nagel                        www.archivemag.co.uk
   Abbey Press   32 Norbins Rd        (01458) 83 3603
   Glastonbury   BA6 9JG         pocket 0797 415 3861

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