Local Image Display - Internet Explorer
Very good of Microsoft to help us switch websites but there is one you might have issues with, the site you are building on your PC. Not always a problem but in some cases, Internet Explorer refuses to display images on a local machine. IE7 seems a common culprit, although the solution we propose applies to other versions, with those following IE6 (XP service pack 2) most problematic.
The image display problem on IE largely arises because of the Local Machine Zone Lockdown feature, intended to stop malware. Whilst we know of cases where clean images do not display, the problem is often with edited images. This can change the internal data in the image to the extent that IE loses trust.
Solutions On The Web
We were contacted by a web designer who hit the issue with a number of images and searched in depth but only found many others asking the same question, plus a few dubious ideas. These revolve around registry hacks and from what we have seen, are to be avoided. They largely don't work and if made to work can have security implications, potentially giving active documents access to your entire file system.
In fairness the person who emailed us recognised those pitfalls, yet was surprised not to find a solution. He had tried several fora and emailed Microsoft support but didn't resolve the issue. We were fortunate in that a couple of our analysts use IE for page building and were able to help.
The Mark Of The Web
When you save a web page to your PC a tag is added called the "mark of the web". This takes the format below:
<!-- saved from url=(0032)http://www.domain.com/ -->If you reopen the page, the tag forces this to open in a higher security zone, instead of the Local Machine Zone. In general this will be the Internet Zone, unless for example you have the site listed as a restricted site. The only caveat is the need for the zone being forced into use to have higher security settings than the Local Zone, which will be the case for most people.
The tag below specifies the Internet Zone and will be the one you use in the majority of cases
<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->The example here specifies the Local Intranet Zone for situations where that may be helpful.
<!-- saved from url=(0016)http://localhost -->In both cases, the tag should be added direcly after the Doctype Declaration as below:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->
<head>
Local Images Now Display on IE
As the heading suggests, with the tag in place the issue should go away and your images display as required. No doubt there will be exceptions and we appreciate this will not solve all problems regarding active display on a local machine but does normally do the job intended.
We were pleased to help our enquirer, hope people searching now find a solution and wish you luck with taking your websites forward. If we can help, you are welcome to take a look at our website mediation service, or the website report section.