redundant preloading

does it tax the server?

[mipapage]

I am designing a site right now that uses some *cough* 80kb jpegs for some close ups. This is the best that can be done given the way the images were made...

Anyway, I am planning on preloading the images, which users can click through to via thumnails. So, at that size, and being as there are eight of them, I'm looking at preloading roughly 500kb.

If I stick the preload script in the index page and the relevant second level pages, will it 're-preload' already pre-loaded images, or just bypass the ones it has and move to the ones that it hasn't downloaded yet?

I don't want to be a bandwidth hog here...

[dmorison]

Hi,

You should be OK.

Use a full path (including your URL) in every image URI and the browser should be happy with using the cached version if it has one - even it was pre-loaded by another page.

It would probably be OK anyway - browsers are reasonably clever these days.

[mipapage]

Thanks dmorison!
And thank you, Tedster.

[edited by: mipapage at 6:45 pm (utc) on April 22, 2003]

[tedster]

I have exactly that situation with a regular column on one site and I have been taking the same preload route for over two years. I can confirm, the browser will not bother pre-loading any image that it knows (exact same path) is already in the cache.