Re: Image loading policy

["Dmitry M. Shatrov" <erdizz rambler ru>]

В Чтв, 07/07/2005 в 04:56 +1200, Matthew Thomas пишет:
> Dmitry M. Shatrov wrote:
> >...
> > I understand that people with broad and cheap Internet don't bother at
> > all about image loading, but I also understand that the developers care
> > about spreading epiphany over the world. And imagine that absence of a
> > single simple option makes epiphany a non-browser at all for me and my
> > neighbors - it simply doesn't work with our home internet channels.
> > Personally I like epiphany a lot for its well-formed simplicity, but I
> > wonder how do you consider image policy control unnecessary. It is a
> > matter of a single checkbox and a lot of users (I'm not speaking about
> > only myself saying "a lot", seriously).
> >...
> 
> Unfortunately, there are many Web pages for which, in Gecko, you have to
> load images to understand them. Sometimes this is because they do not
> have proper alt= text. And sometimes, even if they do have proper alt=
> text, they are written in such a way that they trigger Quirks Mode,
> which means (among many other things) that the image placeholder is
> drawn as a box the size of the unloaded graphic, which means the alt=
> text isn't readable anyway.
> 
> Some of these pages are not idempotent -- loading such a page twice is
> meaningfully different from loading it once. For example, my bank's
> online banking has a graphical menu bar with decent alt= text, but it
> triggers Quirks Mode, so the alt= text is unreadable and I need to see
> the images in it. I can't turn images on in the prefs, and then reload
> the page, because that might make two payments instead of one, or whatever.
> 
> Therefore, having the option not to load images is useful only if there
> is also a function for loading the images in a page that is already
> loaded, without reloading the whole page. Unfortunately, Gecko doesn't
> let you do this. <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47475>
> And the sort of people most likely to be able to contribute to Mozilla
> (because they have a fast Internet connection) are the sort of people
> least likely to be interested in implementing this function (because
> they have a fast Internet connection).
> 
> That said, Safari has such a checkbox in its preferences for image
> loading, without having the ability to load images in an already-loaded
> page. I don't understand why -- maybe it means that everything I just
> wrote is wrong. But I doubt it.

Everything you've said is true. But I'd like to notice that Internet
Explorer and Konqueror both have the ability to load images on demand,
Konqueror even has a nice toolbar button that lets you load all images
on a viewed page by one click - KHTML allows that. But both browsers
still fail when you, for example, register a free email and are asked to
"enter a number in the picture above" (maybe, it is because different
http 1.1 connections are detected or something else). That said, a user
who disables images should also know that he will face difficulties in
operations such as registration or payment. By the way, when it comes to
money, web application should be designed the way that prevents things
like double payment, so either this is not possible or this web
application is lame.

The features you are talking about are not yet in any of the web
browsers here, and it is likely that they will never be here, because
less and less developers have access to cheap wide Internet connections.
Yes, Gecko has limited support for image disabling compared to other
browsers, but the fact that it had such support initially means that
Netscape people decided that this is important, though not crucial. Why
not share their view and add an option to disable images for those who
need it?

Those users who disable images already know that there are cases when
they will have to turn them on for a while. Not because they are
advanced users but because they used other browsers before, and had bad
experience with all of them (IE, Mozilla/FF, Konqueror, Safari - all
have the same usability issues when images are disabled).

This world is not ideal, and it is better to have a method do disable
images than to have a policy to always load them. Especially when
literally all other browsers do.

Regards, Dmitry