Question

I have a page that takes information from a database. It exports a lot of information, so it takes a few seconds to load. I do have an animation, but it is not behaving how I want it to behave. When a user clicks on a link, I want there to be a loading animation instantly, and it shows until the data on the page actually loads.

Here is what it actually does:
When I click on a link, I wait 5 seconds, then the page loads with the animation, then the data loads. The problem is that I want the animation to run instantly, not wait 5 seconds, then run for half a second, then the data loads.

Here is my current JQuery code:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $("#content").hide();
  $(window).load(function() {
    $("#content").show();
    $("#content-loading").hide();
  })
})

content is the content that takes a while to load and content-loading has the loading animation.

Answer 1

$(document).ready() will only run when the DOM is done downloading, basically when </html> is downloaded at the end of your page. If your database data is part of the page, it will be loaded by the time the DOM ready event fires. Meanwhile, $(window).load() will fire when all the resources on the page have loaded; all the images, external stylesheets, etc.

Perhaps you could have a stylesheet before the data which hides the content, then an internal stylesheet at the bottom of your page, after the data, which makes the content display and the #content-loading element hidden?

Otherwise, you could load the data asynchronously in some way, with AJAX or in a frame.