Dialup2.0
Posted 2007-05-31There is simply too much graphics on the web.
Bandwidth is cheap today, and everyone have loads of it. When web designers got more bandwidth, they forgot to keep it simple, and to avoid huge amounts of gigantic images, flash crap, and similar stuff.
Everyone knows that the best way to make many people do something, is to make it fashionable. Web2.0 is fashionable.
To fix the crap problem, utilizing the fashionable effect, I've created a Great New Way to display images! It's utilizing AJAX, combined with WHAT-WG's HTML5 and a brand new XML-based image format. It works in Firefox and other Gecko-based web browsers, it sometimes works in Opera (could anyone tell me why this seems random..?), and it doesn't work in IE at all (that's no bug, that's a feature). It does also not work in Konqueror, but it might work in Safari.
The image format is simple: the main element is the <image> element, that contains a bunch of <row> elements. Those, in turn, contains <pixel> elements, that contains three elements: <red>, <green> and <blue>. An image that is a white pixel would thus be described as
<image> <row> <pixel> <red>255</red> <green>255</green> <blue>255</blue> </pixel> <row></image>
Feeling sick yet? It'll get worse ;)
I have written a javascript library that will utilize AJAX to load these XML files, and then draw them, pixel by pixel, into a <canvas> element.
All you, as a webmaster, will need to do to start using this modern, new image delivering method instead of legacy image formats, is to get this file and include it in your html files, add onLoad="loadXMLImages()" to your <body> tag, and replace all your <img> tags with <canvas> tags. The canvas tag does not have a href attribute, so you need to type the URL to your image as the text content of the tag, as in <canvas>http://URL.here</canvas>. That's it!
Since most images that currently exists are in one of these legacy formats, I have also developed a PHP file that can convert any image you give it (and it likes) into my XML Image format. You can get that here.
What is the end result? Before I give you any link, I must warn you: you Will need a bit of RAM. Your computer Will get slow. And your browser Will go on and on about how there's an unresponsive script (it's just doing it's job!). Of course, this is only true if you use a browser that this works in - if you see a printed URL, it doesn't work. I used quite small images in order to not kill your computer too much. (even 640x480 images are big enough to crash peoples browsers from out-of-memory conditions) Still up for it? Click!
