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dmmiller2k
<P>Thanks, [merlyn]!!</P>
<P>I <U>knew</U> it wouldn't be a waste of time posting this script here. From your <A HREF="http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/col29.html">cited article</A> [<B>bold</B> accents added]:</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><I>Thumbnails, which are miniature versions of the original pictures, help the visitors to a site decide whether they want to take the time to download the entire picture. (Please don't confuse this with what one of my friends calls <B>dumbnails, which are fullsized downloads that are scaled in the browser to be small</B>. Lame.) There's nothing worse than spending two to five minutes downloading a typical JPEG file, only to discover that you've already got it, or it looks, well, useless.</I></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Admittedly, I am, in fact, using so-called "dumbnails" when there are no thumbnails available.</P>
<P>As it happens, <B><I>in this particular application</I></B>, this turns out not only NOT to be a bad thing, it actually turns out to be a good thing: scaling the full-sized images into thumbnails, in effect, caches them at the browser, making the gallery somewhat faster than when I supply actual thumbnails (presuming most kids' parents will wind up looking at every image, which appears to be the case 9 times out of 10).</P>
<P>Typical image sizes created with Kid Pix Studio Deluxe on a machine with a 800x600 pixel screen average anywhere from 3 to 18 Kb in size, or 2 to 12 seconds each to download on a typical dialup speed connection.</P>
<P>One pleasant side effect of using frames is that even before all of the so-called dumbnails are loaded, clicking on one to display it full-sized in the other frame seems to affect the background downloading (caching) of the remaining images not at all.</P>
<P>Your point is well taken, however, that I am forcing users to unnecessarily download ALL of the images; I agree that in probably any other context, this simply would NOT be acceptable. Here, however, the users are almost all, shall we say, motivated.</P>
<P>Next, I plan to augment the script with a version of the solution you present in the <A HREF="http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/col29.html">article</A>, above, hopefully making it more acceptable for other applications.</P>
<P>dmm</P>
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