Forum: Rails Spinoffs (closed, excessive spam) <new Element> optimization

I have 2 problems with Prototype's <new Element> method.

1. I have a lot of DOM elements created manualy with <new Element>. I
have already about 1000 lines of code with just <new Element>. When I
added it to the dome with <body.appendChild(root)> it takes a lot of
time to insert. How to optimize it?

May be it's better to use simple HTML (may be with <new Template>) and
then PUT in on DOM. But how? Is there any body.appendChild(HTML)
method? As I can imaging appendChild takes a DOM element as a
parameter ;-)

2. I need computation of width and height of elements created by the
<new Element> method. As you may know, first of all, I should add my
element in DOM, SHOW it and then get width and height. But, as I just
say, I'm creating a lot of <new Elements> in my script and some of
them SHOULD not be displayed before one point ;-) But the other
elements (childs, as you can imaging) should get width and height.

So, I'm adding <new Elements> to the DOM first of all and SHOW it
every time. But, Opera start render this elements before the script
ends execution (Firefox, Safari do it in opposite direction), so I
have a very ugly effect, where hundreds of elements renders "on fly".
I mean, all of this elements MUST be rendered after script is
finished. I know, that I should just hide the root of my elements, but
how to compute width and height after that?

Thank you for your patient ;-)

All:

Note that Alann has cross-posted this to the new group, so don't reply
here.

-- T.J.