a long shot -> sending output to a browser question

[Luke]

Dan Allen wrote:

> This may be far out, but something I have always wondered because I
> thought I once saw a page do this and couldn't figure out how.  Is it
> possible to trick the browser into thinking the whole page has been
> sent and begin to display data on the page, and then send more.  If
> you are wondering where I got this crazy idea, it was with the
> NuSphere installation, which seemed to load the page over a period of
> time.  The reason I ask here, is because they wrote it in perl (and I
> didn't see any javascript on the page), and I figured it must have
> been something they were doing with output buffering or something and
> perhaps python had the same thing.


Not exactly sure what you're asking, but you can flush the output buffer 
  before it is full so the browser can get the data earlier than it 
would have and thus render it earlier and piece by piece (like what 
you'd want for a status indicator.

You can't trick the browser into thinking the whole page has been sent. 
  Once the socket is closed, it is closed... You would have to reload 
the page from scratch.