Na.... The thing is that those of us who modify the images would be in real trouble. And some of us NEED to modify them, for example, for other languages. So that wouldnt be really welcome. Besides, it´s funny when you see a huge smile suddently go small and to its right size, look at it that way... <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />
One of the excellent things about a PHP version is its ability to determine sizes of images with its built in image functions. I expect to see variables to hold the image sizes in the port, no worries for hard coding.
There's a perl module as well (Image::Size?) that does the same task. Aim it at an image and get back the height/width.
Have a script which can generate some h/w vars in their own .pm, and any time you change the images, run the script to repopulate the h/w values. Shouldn't be that hard at all. (Rather than having every web fetch generate two filesystem requests to each image, one for determining the size, and teh other for the browser request)
Well, there's not a lot of options for Perl versions. You either:
(A) hard-code image sizes in, forcing people to go manually fix them (B) Variabilize the heights and widths, causing them to need to be manually set in w3tvars.pm or such. (C) Variabilize the heights and widths, but have them in their own .pm, which could be autogen'd by some script (D) use Image::Size throughout the scripts causing double file-accesses per page, (E) suffer through the known issues with missing height/width tags.
Of those, (A) sucks, (E) sucks, (D) will cause undue load on heavily accessed systems, and (B) and (C) are functionally equivalent with the exception that one is significantly easier for the owner to maintain.
... or am I missing something? <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />
... ifyou have PHP, or if your web provider offers PHP.
Myself, I don't have PHP installed in my web server (and don't have any immediate plans to install it...) which means that a perl based solution is still needed. Just because a problem vanishes when using PHP doesn't mean we should ignore the large perl installed-base.
Actually, I have an argument against this and I have looked at adding image size tags but decided not to. When I'm at home and not on my cable modem connection, I turn images off. One of my biggest problems with other sites is their lack of alt tags in images which makes it impossible for me to navigate without images. With images off, no sizes and the appropriate alt tags, I love the site.. Try it sometime... dump your cache and go through the site with no images. See how easy it is to navigate. If you put the sizes in you will lose all this navigation.
Again I must speak for PHP here. PHP is very easy to add into virtually any web server and I find it a must now days on every web server I admin or own. Realistically none of those 5 options are as good as the PHP solution. And even if your web host doesn't provide PHP, you can install it as a CGI (which is how your Perl boards run) and even then I think it's faster then Perl. But then again I am a big Zend & PHP fan and I don't think I have a site that doesn't contain at least a bit PHP.
Jerry, without defining height and width, elements of your page leap about on loading (IE5). I say if you know what the height and width is, define it. Otherwise you're about to click on something and suddenly it's 5cm away. And let's be realistic, what proportion of your users don't have images turned on? The same goes for alt tags which you correctly state should be there (if not for vision impaired access). If I were you I would paste the 11x10 post icons into a 12x10 size like the others and set this in the code. Then your page loads sensibly.