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From: tivol@mit.edu (brian tivol)
Subject: Re: Ascii-art in HTML (how to fix)
Date: 1996/09/24
Message-ID: <n9bg248km0v.fsf@bart-savagewood.mit.edu>#1/1
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sender: tivol@bart-savagewood.mit.edu
references: <4rigs4$ed5@olorin.nask.pl> <eGi5pFAd$P3xEwWI@xemu.demon.co.uk>
organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
newsgroups: alt.ascii-art


In article <1996092321155970417@zetnet.co.uk> Jeremy Cooke
<jeremy.c@zetnet.co.uk> writes:

> Ahhh, I thought this thread died ages ago!

It did.  Sorry for this addition to it, but I think it'll be useful.

> The original post (long time ago now) asked whether it was possible 
> to put ASCII art in te alt= tag of an image so users not loading 
> images could have an ASCII version instead. 
>
> The end conclusion was that it is not possible (<pre> works in a few 
> web browsers in the alt string but not all, <BR> won't work either 
> 'cause you can't have tags inside tags).

When this thread first started, there weren't many browsers supporting
the <OBJECT> tag.  Now I think the latest versions of the big angry
browsers will support it, but I doubt many of the others do.  It works
something like this:

  <OBJECT data="snail.gif" type="image/gif"><pre>@_,</pre></OBJECT>

So, if your browser knows both what the OBJECT tag means and how to
display something of the MIME-type "image/gif", you'll see the picture
at the relative URL "face.gif".  Otherwise, if your browser doesn't
recognize OBJECT or "image/gif"s, it will display the HTML between
<OBJECT> and </OBJECT>.  That HTML can have whatever formatting tags
you want, I believe, including IMGs and other OBJECTs.

For the latest version of the spec, check out
  http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-object.html

--brian