Originally Posted by choster

...Second, also in the interest of increasing perceived speed, they're backloading a lot of scripts. If you look at the source of the AA.com homepage, a huge percentage of it is actually scripts that read and send data to Tealium, Google Analytics, and OpenX, the last of which then loads ads. Sometimes, the scripts directly trigger a refresh of the page, either to submit values or to retrieve them, though that's rather primitive. Even if you're doing it in the background, though, loading third party code could also trigger a redraw depending on its dimensions and so forth.