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Image Toolbar Header

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Web | July 11th, 2004

Post

I’m doing some code cleanup around here, and I came to a line in my <head> that is soley to work around an Internet Explorer feature I don’t want on my site.

A highlighted example of an Internet Explorer image toolbar.

Here is the standard way to remove it:

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />

Since the http-equiv attribute is meant to be simply a document-level replacement for real HTTP headers, and I have the ability to send out real HTTP headers, I decided to try out removing this line and replacing it with this bit of PHP, which according to the spec is functionally equivilent:

<?php header ('imagetoolbar: no'); ?>

Looks funky, but according to the HTTP 1.1 specification user agents should ignore headers they don’t recognize, so there’s no harm. However in my testing I was disappointed (though not terribly surprised) to find that Internet Explorer did not respect the header. I have trimmed other parts of my markup quite a bit though, and I’m willing to sacrifice this one line.

17 Responses

Michael Heilemann | July 11th, 2004 @ 10:23 am

What’s the purpose of removing them? And are you ever going to employ the ’subscribe to comments with e-mail’ plugin?

Scott | July 11th, 2004 @ 12:22 pm

Yes, what is the exact point of the no image bar, is it to not be intrusive to the background images or what?

Matt | July 11th, 2004 @ 1:04 pm

It annoys me. I’ll check that plugin out. I helped Jennifer a lot when she was first writing it.

Mark J | July 11th, 2004 @ 1:30 pm

I am assuming that by removing it, you are doing so for persons other than yourself, because a) I doubt you use Internet Explorer personally for anything other than CSS compatibility testing, and b) even if you did use it, you’d probably just turn the stupid thing off in IE’s options.

Actually, you know what? This was going to be a mild rebuke about forcing people to do something when they could be convinced instead, but every time I am at someone else’s place and am using their computer, turning that toolbar off is one of the first things I do. And I sure as hell don’t ask first. I just turn it off and pat myself on the back for making the world a better place. Sometimes the customer ISN’T always right. Sometimes they’re just ignorant.

Here’s a second vote for using the subscribe to comments plugin (which I also contributed to). The great thing about it is that it don’t require anything from you, the admin. If people want to get e-mail notifications, they check (or leave checked) the box, and when they don’t want any more notifications for that entry, they unsubscribe themselves.

David Collantes | July 11th, 2004 @ 2:35 pm

What’s the need of the subscribe to comments plugin, when there is a RSS feed on every post just for comments? I do not understand why to reinvent the wheel.

Mark J | July 11th, 2004 @ 3:00 pm

Not everyone does the RSS dance. Some just prefer e-mail.

Michael | July 12th, 2004 @ 5:26 am

I don’t use RSS in that way…

David Collantes | July 12th, 2004 @ 11:15 am

RSS is the most efficient way to get notified when new comments are entered, IMHO. POP Headlines or FeedDemon and NewsGator are the best I have seeing.

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mixin visuals | July 13th, 2004 @ 12:25 am

thanks for this read. i hate that ie toolbar over images. good stuff

Michael | July 13th, 2004 @ 3:31 am

David: I appreciate that you use your RSS reader as a dumping ground for small things such as the comments on thie thread. But I prefer to keep me reader clean. My mail client - IMO - is much more adept at handling large quantities of mail than my RSS reader is, due to the way I can customize the rules it uses to sort my mail by. My RSS reader (NetNewsWire Lite) doesn’t allow me to do any of these things.

rickup | September 7th, 2004 @ 9:07 pm

I hate that stupid IE toolbar thing on principle alone, so thanks for the tip.

In this particular case, it was causing an image to appear too small to read the text.

Set your monitor to 640×480 then compare:
http://cpr.ca.gov/updates/archives/pdf/09_09_2004/Directions.jpg
to
http://cpr.ca.gov/updates/archives/pdf/09_09_2004/la_directions.shtml

: )

Realtodd | November 25th, 2004 @ 12:43 pm

Thanks for the tip. I am using Crystal Reports, which provides its own printing. That menu confuses users to no end!!!

chris | October 19th, 2005 @ 8:35 am

Thanks for the tip, this is incredibly useful as I am using an image as a basis for a colour picker and the helpful IE toolbar obstructs some of the colours.

Jitendra Madhav | December 15th, 2005 @ 1:10 am

can i do this in CSS?

Akhila | May 18th, 2006 @ 2:41 pm

Thankyou very much for your help. I used java script to protect my webpage but i didnot know a way to get rid of image tool bar. thanks

gh0st | February 7th, 2007 @ 9:53 am

“And I sure as hell don’t ask first. I just turn it off and pat myself on the back for making the world a better place. Sometimes the customer ISN’T always right. Sometimes they’re just ignorant.”

Precisely why we programmers try to keep you graphics monkeys as far away from the truly dangerous things as possible. Have not seen a more ‘ingnorant’ comment from a techno-phile in a LOOOOONG time.

(to the author: great tip, thanks)