Preloading images ??

[Catarina Rehn]

Hi!
I heard somewhere that it is possible to preload images in JScript, I now wonder if there is someone that know how to do this? or maybe know a site where I can read about it?
Catarina.

[David Roberts]

It's been a long time. But I think you can use the Image objects. i.e.
imgOn = new Image("ButtonOn.gif");
imgOff = new Image("ButtonOff.gif");
That might be right, I don't remember...


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David Roberts, SCJP2

[Frank Carver]

Browsers generally cache images, so if you know you are going to need some images on later pages, then it is quite feasible to load them "invisbly" on the current page, using a simple <img src="/wherever/images/a.gif" width=1 height=1> anywhere on the page
This won't get in the way of someone reading the text on the page, but willl cache the image in the background. It is always advisable to use a full path to the images if you do this, just in case the browser caches /wherever/pages/../images/a.gif differently than /wherever/other/../images/a.gif (which it might).
This system has a few advantages over the Javascript version above:
1. It doesn't need Javascript, so it will work in browsers which don't support JavaScript, or which have Javascript disabled.
2. If the user has turned of images (or is using a text-only browser), then there is no overhead of loading images which won't ever be shown.
I hope this helps.