I know there are some ways to get notified when the page body has loaded (before all the images and 3rd party resources load which fires the window.onload e
YUI uses three tests to do this: for Firefox and recent WebKit there's a DOMContentLoaded event that is fired. For older Safari the document.readyState watched until it becomes "loaded" or "complete". For IE an HTML
tag is created and the "doScroll()" method called which should error out if the DOM is not ready. The source for YAHOO.util.Event shows YUI-specific code. Search for "doScroll" in the Event.js.