img src=xxx.php broken in NS?

Anon

I seem to have a very interesting problem. I've built a MySQL database that stores images as BLOBs. I pull the images out of the database with a PHP script like so:

This works very well. My DB stores image type, size, all that stuff, and my PHP script returns the appropriate HTTP headers for the image, the image appears on the page, and all is right with the world. However, a user just pointed out to me that he's getting broken-image links when he views the page with Netscape 4.5.
I've tested NS6 and IE5, and they both work fine. If you browse directly to the PHP script in NS4.5 with this in the location field:

http://www.host.com/img.php?imgid=123

...it WORKS. It only fails to work in NS4.5 when I refer to it in another page with <img src="">. I just can't figure out what the heck is going on here... anyone else seen anything like this?

brandonschnell

since you're using relative URLs you might need to specify a BASE HREF

http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/head/base.html
http://www.sbrady.com/hotsource/html/base.html

Anon

Brandon Schnell wrote:

since you're using relative URLs you might need to specify a BASE HREF

Yep, I thought of that too. I tried it with a base href defined, and also with absolute src URLs, and I get the same thing... works in NS6 & IE5, breaks in NS4.5.

Anon

Maby this helps you:
http://php.holtsmark.no/base64img/

Check the demo-site if it is working correctly in NS and let me know.

Anon

Rolf wrote:

Maby this helps you:
http://php.holtsmark.no/base64img/

Check the demo-site if it is working correctly in NS and let me know.

Hey, nice PHP work. 🙂 I've done a little more experimentation and discovered that when I serve my page from a different webserver, <img src="x.php"> works even in NS4.5. Also, I have discovered that the problem persists at my current webhost even when I eliminate the db from the equation by doing something like:

<?php
header("Content-type: image/jpeg");
readfile("images/x.jpg");
?>

Furthermore, I have discovered that Opera 5 will actually crash when I browse to the current webserver as soon as I scroll down to one of the PHP-driven images. The base64img code works fine on my test server, but again, same broken img for base64img when I serve it up from the same place as my broken page. I'm starting to wonder if it might not be a really weird Apache problem... but this is definitely one for the knowledge base. Will post the solution if I ever find it. 🙂
ARRGH!

Anon

Thanks, that would be nice!

Anon

Are you using ob_gzhandler? This breaks images on NS4..

Anon

OK... got it figured out. 🙂 My pages are being hosted at a commercial web hosting service, and they\\\\'re using Apache, just like me. However, my hosting providers fail to properly load the MIME-Magic module in their apache config. The result is that when a file ends with a known file extension, (like .jpg) all is well. When the file is something weird like img.php?id=23, the server/client transfer fails even though I\\\\'m sending the correct Content-type: header. I\\\\'ve found that if I also include \\\\'Content-transfer-encoding: base64\\\\', it works for all the browsers I try it with. Thanks, everybody, for the input and good ideas!