Recalculating graphics is an important direction, and I believe scripting support is the key technology in making this happen quickly. Visit the Macromedia site. A dialog appears saying you don't have the plug in. A brief download and a confirmation with a certificate confirms that you want to install it. You don't have to restart the system or the browser.
Text starts moving, a little, awards awkwardly tumble into position.
Lots of commercial messages. At a technical level, Flash is more efficient that the GIF and JPEG bitmaps that populate websites now. There's no reason why it shouldn't be as quick to download as HTML text. And of course HTML is going that way in the next browsers from Netscape and Microsoft. Times Square Someone should do a site that scrolls the news in an entertaining way using a Flash file in a web page that refreshes every 30 seconds.