Question

Is there a way to force the browser to display a page only after all of the page’s contents are completely loaded (such as images, scripts, css, etc)?

Answer 1

The easiest thing to do is putting a div with the following CSS in the body:

#hideAll
 {
   position: fixed;
   left: 0px; 
   right: 0px; 
   top: 0px; 
   bottom: 0px; 
   background-color: white;
   z-index: 99; /* Higher than anything else in the document */

 }

(Note that position: fixed won’t work in IE6 – I know of no sure-fire way of doing this in that browser)

Add the DIV like so (directly after the opening body tag):

<div style="display: none" id="hideAll">&nbsp;</div>

show the DIV directly after :

 <script type="text/javascript">
   document.getElementById("hideAll").style.display = "block";
 </script> 

and hide it onload:

 window.onload = function() 
  { document.getElementById("hideAll").style.display = "none"; }

or using jQuery

 $(window).load(function() {  document.getElementById("hideAll").style.display = "none"; });

this approach has the advantage that it will also work for clients who have JavaScript turned off. It shouldn’t cause any flickering or other side-effects, but not having tested it, I can’t entirely guarantee it for every browser out there.