Posted on 03/17/2003 8:06:32 AM PST by I Am Not A Mod
Edited on 03/18/2003 2:47:22 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Hi all.
Pretty much everyone knows that things are about to get quite busy. Whenever this happens, people make suggestions such as "don't post graphics, so as to help Free Republic handle the traffic".
I wanted to be proactive and explain some misconceptions with this. For images which are not hosted by Free Republic, they do not impact on the response time for Free Republic. All our server has to produce, for a page to have a graphic on it, is a handful of characters in the form of an image tag:
<IMG SRC="http://some.url.for.the.graphic">As such, NOT posting graphics helps Free Republic handle the load not at all. It does not take much bandwidth, at all, for the server to spit out that small amount of text.
HOWEVER, that is not all that should be said about the matter. First off, people who do post graphics should use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes when posting their images. The format of the IMG tag with these is as follows:
<IMG HEIGHT="100" WIDTH="200" SRC="http://some.url.for.the.graphic">Where the 100 and 200 are replaced with the correct height and width (in pixels) of the image being posted. This is because many browsers, if these attributes are not included, will not load the rest of the thread until it can completely download the image, since the browser does not know how much space to leave for the image. This can cause it to appear as if Free Republic has stalled, if the server providing the image is overloaded or responding slowly. If you do use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes, the page will load normally even if the image takes a while.
Further, if you are finding that your browser is responding slowly because of images, the answer is for you to turn off the automatic loading of images within your browser preferences.
Thanks for your time.
[Adding a few new thoughts]
1) If you find that because of whatever reason, images are slowing down your Freeping to an unacceptable level, you should turn off the loading of graphics within your own web browser. If you don't know how, post a question here and someone will undoubtably answer (a how-to for two common browsers is listed below). Don't let the lack of a fast internet connection cause you to want to deny images to everyone else, especially when you can totally control it within your own browser.
2) That said, those who post graphics should understand that it is unrealistic to think that everyone will get the word, so overdoing the graphics is simply an invitation to tick some people off. Further, even for those who have broadband connections, and even if the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags are specified on all images, a ton of graphics can cause some users' computers to slow to a crawl by using up all the available memory. Be considerate.
3) Here are instructions for how to disable the automatic loading of images (From NonValueAdded, who added value here):
To: Vol2727In Netscape 7.0 From menu bar choose "Edit" --> "preferences", window pops up. Click on "privacy & security" then "images" choose "Do not load any images"
In Internet Explorer 6.0 From menu bar choose "Tools" --> "Internet Options", window pops up. Choose "Advanced" tab and scroll down to "Multimedia" section. Find the "Show Images" box and uncheck it.
Voila (sorry, I spoke French), enjoy your image free browsing experience while the rest of us groove on the nifty graphics.
Other browsers have similar settings.
201 posted on 03/17/2003 8:00 PM EST by NonValueAdded ("Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." GWB 9/20/01)
Iraq Already Printing Post-War Currency
What you said is true enough, but in some situations it will still need to get the whole image.
Consider a thread with 7 graphics posts, and for the scenerio consider a browser that is set up to allow a maximum of five concurrent http requests. Imagine that the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes were not used.
When the page loads, it won't even try to get the last image's http headers until after at least one of the other pictures completely downloads (even if the thread's html has finished downloading). And many browsers will stop rendering at that position.
We have many threads that end up with dozens upon dozens of images. The only ways to ensure that people don't get stuck waiting for pictures to download are for people to disable the loading of images, or for people to always use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes.
go to 'Tools' in the top menu bar, then clear the highlighted line.
The image on the left in my post is a copy of the image you originally linked to BUT I scaled it to 200 x 305, put it on my own server, then linked to it AND the image that you posted (displayed on the right hand side of the screen.)
Sorry if this is confusing, I have a feeling that I'm not doing a good job explaining it.
The key is that in my post there are two different files linked to. The one on the right is the one you originally linked to, in the fashion that you linked to it.
The one on the right is a copy of that image that I scaled to a width of 200 and put back on the web on my own server, simply to show how much better images look at their original resolution.
I'm still hoping for a GMT time zone option...
Possibly. The answer to that question is far beyond the scope of this message. On the flipside, it can be considered rude to rely upon others' bandwidth to supply images for your own purposes.
Can you just right-click and look in "properties" for image size and address?
You cannot rely upon that method to show you the "native" resolution of the image, only the size of the image as displayed on that page. You can rely upon that method (in Internet Explorer, anyway) only when you open the image in its own window. For example, check out this image from my server.
If you right mouse click the image to get the properties it will report that the height is 180 and the width is 155, but if you click on the image to open it in its own window you will see that the "native" resolution of the image is width=310 and height=360.
(To sum it up, IE's properties windows tells you only the displayed resolution.)
Hey, that's pretty cool. I always wondered how to do that. Thanks.
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