Don’t know my gifs from my jpgs

I've just spent the morning fixing my website.

I think the problem had been ongoing for a little while before I noticed it. Pages were downloading, but hanging slightly. Then last night I noticed some images weren't showing up at all. I checked in Firefox and IE and had the same problem (IE fell over completely on them). Initially I suspected my PC, so I checked for any HOSTS files and other blocking without any success, and then tested on another machine (same three browsers), but no dice.

Maybe it's the router? Why it would be I've no idea, but it was a common factor. So I tested via my Palm. The pages worked on Opera Mini :hat: So I tested on WebPro and WebPro 3. The pages worked when diverted through a proxy, but not when loading direct. Back to the desktop. I looked at the pages via a web proxy. They loaded fine. Without the proxy, the images were hanging. In every case this would be just one or two images on a page (and it only affected a few pages).

I tried re-uploading the images to web space. My ftp application rebelled! :bomb:

I got confirmation of the hanging from my ISP's support newsgroup. At least I knew it wasn't the router (or anything else to do with my connection). That set me thinking about an incompatibility between my ISP and my web host… But it's not that. Some people could see the images using the ISP-branded browser (maybe it goes through a proxy). Hmmmm….

Finally I decided that I needed to sort out the pages whatever the problem. My home page was hanging badly in IE, making it unusable (ok, that amused me… but in the end I want people to visit). So needs must. In the main I just deleted the image links from the html. In a couple of cases I resaved the image to gif format on the basis that maybe, somehow, the original image files had become corrupted. In all cases the pages were working again. Fantastic.

Turns out that all this was down to 'author' error. In a few cases I'd inadvertently (totally carelessly) saved gif files with jpg extensions (html was correct in that it pointed to jpg files). This hadn't been a problem in the past (at least I'm fairly sure not), so I'm beginning to suspect that the wmf fixes of the past week or so are doing their job well and forcing much stricter compliance on all image files. No bad thing… and it'll teach me to take more care in future.