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

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?