I have noticed that when these forums are loading a new page that the little eyeglasses and letter are originally showing as much larger graphics. They are then resizing to the little things that we see. Is this less efficient in terms of memory usage and bandwidth than if they were made the needed size to begin with?

I think I know what you're talking about and the answer is yes, images should be sized with a graphics program instead of using HTML. However, I don't think that this is the case with the little glasses on the forum.

I saw this really neat code that gets the video mode of the browser, then rescales the image on the fly to make sure it is right-sized.

It makes the 800x600 vs 1024x768 problem with graphics a smaller problem.

Can't seem to find the code any more though...

That sounds like a cool script. The only problem with that is, you would still be downloading a larger image size (lets say the 1024x768 version) to display on the 800x600 web site. it would be cooler if they had a script that replaced the image urls on the fly to the predesignated 1024 or 800 vesions of the image.

They do .. there's a script around (it might be at Dynamic Drive but I'm not sure) that detects the browser version and displays the correct graphics. Its cool if you've got an entirely graphic display but it can also be a pain in the butt if you're trying to figure out three or four graphic sets. I think its easier to make graphics that can blend into tables to expand to any size.

the code did have two parts to it, one the "getting the size" and second the rescale of the image. The image scaling actually recreated the image on the fly, therefore would have been smaller. It worked with GIF and PNG files.