Topic awaiting preservation: fade out after images load?

Hey,
I have been redoing my site in my spare time and I have converted my stuff over to php. The php script opens a css template, opens a plain text html file, stripsout the unwanted html, then load that into a scrollable area in the css template. In IE5.5, the images and text, everything, appears on the screen all at once. you don't see any images loading or whatever. You do sit there a bit while it all gets to your computer, but once it's there, boom, it's on the screen. in opera6 and ns6, you see a bgcolor, and images loading, you know what i'm talking about.
I don't know why IE5.5 is doing this, loading then dispalying all at once, but I kinda like it. This got me to thinking (on a small scale) That it would be nice to have it appear all at once on all the major browsers.
I have tried preloading images with one page, than doing a redirect to the page where the images are actually used, but this doesn't work real well.
I was wondering if there was a way to have a layer or z index that was on the very top that would show a "page loading" type of thing with a color defined for that layer/z-index. This would be see while the rest of the images/text load. Once all was loaded, the top layer could fade out or go off, leaving exposed the loaded page under it.
This would require the top level div to be able to be faded or made hidden at some point. Is this possible?
Thanks

Absolutely possible and it sounds like you've got all the right ideas to make it happen.

What I usually do is have a very simple centered piece of text in the body of my page to say the page is loading. All my images are on a div with the visibility set to hidden. Then I use the onload page trigger to call function that simply sets the visibility to visible and there you go. You should be able to get that working just fine in IE, NN, and Opera.

You can also call a fade in script on the onload event occurs if you want a smoother transition.

. . : slicePuzzle