[H-GEN] Embedding images in HTTP response?

[Martin Pool]

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On 16 Feb 2001, Michael Anthon <michael at anthon.net> wrote:

> I'm tossing around the idea of dynamically generating graphs using the
> GD funcitons in PHP.  This all works quite nicely *but* there is at
> least 3 ways that I can think of for doing it, each with it's own set of
> problems.

#1 is the cleanest solution; #2 is a reasonable tradeoff if the
expense of the query justifies the complication of managing temporary
files.  Remember that sometimes the browser may e.g. have been set not
to download images by default, and so there can be a significant delay
between loading the HTML and the image.

There are also tradeoffs between them:

  * do #1 but cache the results of the most recent N queries of this sort 

  * do #2, but return the image through a PHP script that will recreate it if 
    it does not exist in the cache

#3 is not really possible in HTTP.


--  
Martin Pool


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