- From: Adam Thodey <athodey@engin.umich.edu>
- Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 14:24:43 -0400 (EDT)
- To: lilley <lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk>
- Cc: www-html@www10.w3.org
How would I set up the IMG tag such that would allow many different formats to be downloaded depending on the users WEB browser? Would be be done, by lets say I had image type foo, bar, etc... and just used: <IMG SRC="imagename"> would that automatically look for types or how would that work? Thanks again, ADAM On Fri, 21 Jul 1995, lilley wrote: > Adam Thodey wrote: > > > I was wondering if there was a standard (i did not notice this in the > > 3.00 spec) which would only allow certain types of graphics, i.e., GIF, > > XBM etc.? > > No, ther eis not one in the standard, nor is there likely to be. > > > Would this mean that if the browser supports inline JPEGS or inline TIFF > > or inline PICT that this is acceptable HTML inclusion? > > There are two questions here that need to be disentangled. > > 1) If my browser supports inline foo is it acceptable for my browser > to request an inline image of type foo? The answer is yes. If the > server has that image in format foo it will send that by preference. > > It is more likely that your browser will say it can accept inline images > in several formats: foo bar etc and the server will send whichever of these > it has (or an error saying, nothing suitable was found). > > This is called content negotiation and relies on the client expressing > which formats it can accept and the server being able to supply the various > formats; possibly by performing a conversion on the fly. Not all clients > and not all servers can do this. Also, most content authors link to > explicit formats. Also, image format conversion while maintaining quality > is not as simple as it looks. > > 2) If my browser supports inline foo should I write pages with an > explicit link to image.foo > > The answer is, it depends on your audience. If you are fairly sure they > can all read foo format that is fine. For example because they all have > a particular browser (a browser demo or fan club page for example). > > In general though, no assumptions can be made; in general, servers do not > do image format conversion on the fly (if anyone has written a server or > server extension that does, feel free to drop me a line as I would like > to test it). So it is a case of authoring what the maximum number of people > can already accept inline. > > GIF87a is a safe bet. > > GIF89a (the one with transparency) is extremely common and GIF87a > readers can read it, they just ignore the extensions. > > XBM is pretty widespread > > JPEG JFIF is now common > > other formats supported inline include > > PICT (some Mac browsers, only) > NCSA HDF (NCSA Mosaic for X, only) > PNG (Amiga Mosaic so far) > > Chimera supports just about any format inline, as it is user extendable. > > > or is there going > > to be a strict standard for image types? > > Clearly, this list will evolve over time. Once popular formats may become > used less (so newer browsers stop supporting them); newer formats may become > more popular. This is why the HTML standard does not dictate a list of > acceptable inline image formats. > > -- > Chris Lilley, Technical Author > +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ > | Manchester and North HPC Training & Education Centre | > +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ > | Computer Graphics Unit, Email: Chris.Lilley@mcc.ac.uk | > | Manchester Computing Centre, Voice: +44 161 275 6045 | > | Oxford Road, Manchester, UK. Fax: +44 161 275 6040 | > | M13 9PL BioMOO: ChrisL | > | URI: http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/staff/lilley/lilley.html | > +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ > > +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Adam M. Thodey athodey@engin.umich.edu | | Personal Homepage on the WEB http://www.engin.umich.edu/~athodey | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
Received on Friday, 21 July 1995 14:29:23 UTC