bvaughn

Infinite lists and reflow

In my experience, infinite lists use two basic layout strategies. The first uses absolute positioning to control where visible items are rendered. The second uses relative positioning (with top/left padding to offset for unrendered items).

In both cases, the list abstraction caches some metadata about the size of items once they have been rendered– so that it knows where to position the items that come after them.

Both of these strategies need to handle reflow. For example, changing the width of a list often affects the height of its itesm. Generally speaking, only the "window" of rendered (visible) items are remeasured in this case (because it would be too slow to rerender and remeasure all of the items before). But once a user scrolls backwards (up/left)– the list needs to account for the reflowed sizes. If it didn't, items would appear to jump up or down (depending on the delta between the previous, cached sizes and the new/reflowed sizes).

How the list deals with new sizes

paulirish

What forces layout / reflow

All of the below properties or methods, when requested/called in JavaScript, will trigger the browser to synchronously calculate the style and layout*. This is also called reflow or layout thrashing, and is common performance bottleneck.

Generally, all APIs that synchronously provide layout metrics will trigger forced reflow / layout. Read on for additional cases and details.

Element APIs

Getting box metrics

• elem.offsetLeft, elem.offsetTop, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight, elem.offsetParent