Re: displaying vCard photos

[rjray]

That is tricky, since the nature of HTML assumes that the source for an IMG tag is a wholly separate URI, and not inline. I think they might be making allowances for this in XHTML 2.0, but I don't know for sure (and it doesn't exactly help you either way).

As another commenter noted, you could save the content to a file and refer to the file in your SRC attribute. Of course, that will lead to another HTTP request, so you have to either put it in a place that your server already uses for content, have some sort of aliasing set up, or have your script handle both types of request-- the vCard proper and the image attachments. That is what I would do-- have the same script (I assume this is CGI?) that displays the vCard-as-HTML also have a calling-form to fetch the image content. Then return that content with proper Last-Modified, Content-Type, etc. headers and such based on the timestamp of the vCard itself.

[jaldhar]

That is tricky, since the nature of HTML assumes that the source for an IMG tag is a wholly separate URI, and not inline.

A data uri could be used to display an inline image created on the fly. It would look something like this:

<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,11111111111111111111111111" />

where the 1's represent the base64 encoded bytes. Mozilla supports it but does the eighty ton gorilla? It looks like it might not.

[rjray]

I didn't mention it because I wasn't sure how well-supported it was. I do that in GreaseMonkey scripts, to embed icons within the script, but then I know in those cases that I'm in a Firefox/Mozilla environment.

I stand by my opinion that having the script do double-duty (return HTML or image data based on parameters in the query) is probably going to yield the cleanest, most-maintainable result.