[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...

[Physicist]

But it only has to grab each image headers once per image, at preview time. After that, it's hardwired into the HTML. The bandwidth overhead should be negligible.

If the image server doesn't respond in a timely manner (a few seconds, I'd say), the preview screen could just time out and give a warning message. In that case, it's probably not an image that should be posted right then anyway.

[Jay D. Dyson]

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...

Actually, that's incorrect. The FR server doesn't download the images at all. The client browser (Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, et al) is the only thing downloading the remote images. The FR server never sees them.

The advice on including height and width attributes in the img src tags is both valid and good and should save lots of folks lots of headaches.

-Jay