Re: How to use "Content-type: multipart..." with CGI

[Scott Klement <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Joe,

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with AlternaTIFF, and I'm not familiar with 
it's capabilities...  But I'm skeptical that you are going down the 
right road.

The idea of using an <object> HTML tag makes perfect sense if you're 
going to view it in a browser.  But, can AlternaTIFF understand HTML?

Assuming that it can, are you sure you want to stream the TIFF file 
inside the <object> tag as a (base64 encoded) inline image?  That's a 
kind of weird thing to do.  Again, a browser would understand it (in an 
<img> tag) but would AlternaTIFF?

The normal way in a browser to have the file be transfered in two 
requests.  The first one would request the HTML from the server (this 
can call a CGI, and the CGI can return the HTML.)  The HTML would have a 
reference/URI that points to the image, and a new request would be made 
to get that image (in raw image format, not as base64 text).  That 
second request could also potentially point to a CGI program.  Assuming 
AlternaTIFF supports HTML at all, this is the scenario that I would 
expect would be most likely to work.

Using an <img> or <object> tag to refer to a URI, and then having that 
URI contain HTML (not just the image) seems very unlikely to work (even 
in a browser!) since those tags would be expecting the raw image file, 
not an HTML file.  Right?


On 8/26/2011 2:51 PM, Joe Wells wrote:
> Thank you for all of the responses.
>
> My first task was to learn about Base64.  I learned a lot from Scott
> Klements (thank you!) article
> http://systeminetwork.com/article/base64-built-ibm-i .
>
> Since then I have tried several things.    As previously mentioned,
> we use AlternaTIFF to view our tiff images.  Their documentation
> suggests a number of methods to embed TIFF documents with HTML.  At
> the moment, the most promising seems to be the OBJECT tag.  Their
> example looks like this -
>
> <object width=200 height=200
>    classid="CLSID:106E49CF-797A-11D2-81A2-00E02C015623">
> <param name="src" value="tiffdocument.tif">
> <param name="negative" value="yes">
> </object>
>
> Note: the value for CLASSID forces the browser to use the AlternaTIFF
> viewer.
>
> I then searched how to use Base64 with the OBJECT tag and came up
> with this -
>
> <object id="test" width=100% height=75%
> classid="CLSID:106E49CF-797A-11D2-81A2-00E02C015623"
> data="data:application/x-oleobject;base64, .......Base64
> data.......... ">test2</object>
>
> My problem is thast I am not sure that the encoding is properly
> working.  I searched for sites that would test Base64 data as well as
> sample Base64 data - but I had no luck.
>
> Any thoughts, comments, or suggestions?