[Physicist]

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.

I Did Not Know That. Thank you! I have seen the light, and am reformed.

John: This really is a common problem. Can a method be devised for FR to give size modifiers to image tags automatically, if a user doesn't provide them? Of course, you wouldn't want to hardwire them, since you don't want to screw up the aspect ratios, but could the FR software someday attempt to "discover" the resource sizes at posting time?

As a stopgap, the software could simply reject IMG tags without height and width modifiers, warning the user at preview time, and providing a message telling him what to do.

[John Robinson]

As a stopgap, the software could simply reject IMG tags without height and width modifiers, warning the user at preview time, and providing a message telling him what to do.

Indeed, it is nearly time for my yearly crucifixion.

I do plan on working out these image issues (there are others) in due time. On my list they're a mid-priority feature.

[general_re]

Can a method be devised for FR to give size modifiers to image tags automatically, if a user doesn't provide them? Of course, you wouldn't want to hardwire them, since you don't want to screw up the aspect ratios, but could the FR software someday attempt to "discover" the resource sizes at posting time?

That really would start taking bandwidth from FR - how does the server know what height and width to assign to an image without at least grabbing the image file headers? Before, when you were previewing for the first time, your browser only had to open a connection to the remote URL for the image file, and download it straight to you, without FR's server bandwidth being used at all (except for the IMG tag itself, of course), but now the server itself would also have to download the image in order to know what attributes to give it, in order to at least preserve the aspect ratio...