This is a weird one.  I have a page I'm working on, and I made a simple div that slides up to display some content, then slides down, replaces the content and slides back up again.  Basically a showy news ticker.

When I created the div/animation code it ran fine.  smooth as silk.  However, I then decided to move that part of the html into a templated system, where some php reads a second file and outputs the contents into the webpage. (real simple stuff, it uses file_get_contents and echo to output the file contents).

Using this system, it all displays correctly, but the animation is suddenly slow and jerky.  This doesn't make sense to me.  Why would the animation suddenly become jerky just because the html that creates the divs is now created via php?  Surely the php fires long before jquery gets involved - so why would this occur?

Anyone have any idea what might be causing this?