[thelist] Cookies and images

Matt Warden mwarden at gmail.com
Fri Feb 4 16:40:43 CST 2005


Joshua,

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 13:57:49 -0500, Joshua Olson <joshua at waetech.com> wrote:
> I'm halfway surprised that the w3 spec didn't account for adding ways to add
> meta-information to binary information (downloads, images, sounds, etc) as
> they were sent to the browser.  While it is possible to send meta
> information via cookies, it doesn't seem to be available in the calling
> document in all cases (at least not in IE, which is still, believe it or
> not, the most prolific browser available).

Have you tried something like this:

img.src = "/foo/bar.jpg";
setTimeout("alert(document.cookie);", 5000);

to test whether the cookie is added to document.cookie after the image
is loaded? I know you said that the img.onload seems to work in
IE/Moz, but if it's non-spec, I guess I would check and make sure it's
not just half-implemented.

> Wait a sec... I just had a ridiculous thought... what if, on the server, I
> packaged the jpeg into a JS variable, assigned the meta data to js
> variables, and then returned the information using the RPC technique posted
> the other day by Keith Gaughan.  Is there a way to "draw" an image from JS
> data if it's encoded the right way?

Yes.

<img src="javascript:imagedata" width="16" height="16">

where imagedata is a javasript variable that holds the image data.

Whether this is a good idea is left as an exercise for the reader.

However, it does look like it would solve your problem if you did a
XMLHttpRequest() for something like:

<image>
        <data>...</data>
        <author>Joe Blow</author>
        ....
</image>

You might have to do some fancy character-to-binary conversion with
the contents of <data></data>, because it will probably be interpreted
as text.

AFAIK, though, IE doesn't like any image format in this form but XBM.


-- 
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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