Firefox, missing images, and image placeholders
Hi all. New to this forum. I'm looking for some solution to a rather frustrating problem and thought I'd try here. I've searched the archives but didn't turn anything up. I hope this is a good section to post this.
How does Firefox deal with missing images, and with image placeholders? Its behavior seems inconsistent.
For example, I have a page that references images that are not yet available, but whose page location and dimensions are specified in the HTML and CSS. When viewing this page in Firefox, these images are frequently (though not always) entirely unaccounted for in the display: There is no 'missing image' icon where the images should be, and the space they would have occupied is simply closed up, as though they had a display:none rule.
On those occasions when the missing image icon does show up in Firefox, if I hit the Reload button, the page reloads without any indication that the images are missing, and their space is again simply closed up.
There is a setting in Firefox's Advanced Preferences where this can apparently be adjusted. This is the "browser.display.show_image_placeholders" setting, which can be set to true or false. I've set and reset this to true, exiting Firefox each time, but it doesn't make any difference.
In contrast, using IE 6, missing images are always indicated by an image icon, and the space they would occupy on the page is fully accounted for in the layout when their dimensions are provided in the HTML.
Am I overlooking something? Or is that just the way it is? It's certainly inconvenient.
Thank you!
Busy posted this at 21:25 — 18th February 2006.
He has: 6,151 posts
Joined: May 2001
My findings is it's a CSS issue, if the image is being served with a slice of CSS then the placeholder is wiped out and makes a very jumpy loading site (on dialup), and no broken image just alt if that otion chosen.
Depending on your layout style, you can set border:1px for images in CSS if the images arent there yet.
In some ways FF not displaying the image is good and bad, good as it doean't show ugly broken image but bad as it can mess up the layout if used for layout
WebberificGrrl posted this at 22:22 — 18th February 2006.
She has: 3 posts
Joined: Feb 2006
Thank you for the reply, Busy!
In my global css, images are set to not have any borders, so perhaps that's it (though it doesn't *seem* it should work that way.) I'll have to play around with that. But of course, the css is currently set the way I want it, and to change it just to accommodate these temporary circumstances is hardly ideal. But better to add a temporary image border to the layout than to have Firefox close up the image space altogether.
What somewhat complicates things is that the sections of HTML with the "missing" images are being generated by a CMS engine, which iterates on what is, in the template, just a few lines of code that include an image reference -- with that image not always available in the post/entry being fetched from the cms database.
Anyway, thanks again!
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