Hi Res vs. Lo Res Images

[akogo]

I hope this is the right place for this question. Is there any web script that gives the surfer a choice between a hi resolution or low resolution version of the same image file? Normally, we have to compress or optimize an image to reduce the file size in order for it to load fast. But we have to save this image as a new file. What I'm wondering is if this can be done without "permanently" changing the original image file, but yet get the benefit of a fast loading image?

[piskie]

Have a look at:

<img src="highdef.jpg2 lowsrc="lowdef.jpg">

This is a straight HTML function which first loads the lower definition image first.

When the whole page is loaded and displayed, the browser then downloads the high definition images and substitutes them.

Not a script but could possibly do what you need.

[Mark_A]

piskie I may be wrong but when I last tried that I think I recall that it only really worked on Netscape not IE.

Do I recall wrong?

[tedster]

The lowres attribute was never approved by the W3C, and I don't know if recent browsers support it. It's usefulness waned as dial-up connection speeds went from 14 to 28 to 33 to 56.

At any rate, when a lowres attribute is imcluded in an image tag, the download of the high res image continues automatically after the lowres image appears. So the visitor is not given a choice, the way akogo would prefer, but instead they are automatically spoon-fed images -- first the lowres and then the highres.

I don't think there's an easy way to accomplish akogo's goal. You might do some scripting, identifying each image with a variable and then assigning each variable to a different image URL according to some visitor input. But that seems quite complex to me for most situations.

Of course, I'm not looking at the exact situation, but it seems pretty straightforward to place links for a high-res version of each image somewhere on the page and use a reasonably low-res image for the standard page display.