Trouble Shooting Images
Offline Image Solutions
1)
Small Sites: Use ONE directory
.
If your site is not very large, keep everything in a single directory on your
hard drive, as well as on your web server. This will make everything as
close to the same as possible so as to avoid confusion. Also, browsers
tend to have trouble displaying things offline when they are in other directories.
So, take all of your html files and images and place them in a directory
you can find easily. Maybe: c:\webpage would be a good spot. After that,
use a local link to all of your images by typing only the filename of the
image into the image tag:
Now,
all of your images should show up just fine, and you will not have to change
all of your image tags when you put the page online!
2)
Large Sites: A bit tougher.
If
you want to separate your site into various directories for organization,
this can give you a really hard time when you are trying to work offline.
Why? Both web browsers have their limitations working offline. If you are
using Netscape, the only way I can see to view everything offline is to
throw it all into the same directory. Otherwise, your interior links won't
work, and you will be stuck with broken images. IE also has some troubles,
but it is more flexible with offline browsing. In IE, you can use shortcuts
to the directories and filenames.
For example:
IMG SRC="/images/mypic.gif">
The
problem: IE starts its search for the file from your
root
directory
. In other words, it is looking for
c:\images\mypic.gif
If
your html file is in c:\webpage and the image you want is in
c:\webpage\images
,
this can really throw you off. Of course you can fix the image tag, but
you will have to redo the tag before you upload the page to your server.
There are ways around this, especially with IE, but they are a bit more
complicated than you may want to deal with. With IE4 under Windows 9x,
I created a new drive letter j:\ (virtual hard drive) and moved
the web page files there. Thus, the root directory was in the right
spot, and I could use the same image tags online and offline. I won't get
into how to create a virtual hard drive here, because there are so many
operating sytems to deal with. If you know how, you might want to give
it a try. If not, then don't try it. You may find trying to make a virtual
hard drive is more trouble than the limitations of browsing offline. Maybe
offline browsing will be easier in the future, but for now putting
everything in the same directory is the only sure thing.
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