Whats the deal with hosted PNG charts?
Sometimes people want to post charts on the Web for others to view, for instance in online Web logs, journals, BBS discussions, and so on. The best way to do that is to download the chart and post it in one’s own server space. However, many people don’t have server space they can conveniently use for this purpose. If I ever display a chart as an image in an HTML page, then I must make the chart available through some kind of URL, however temporary and obscure, and then it is inevitable that people will embed the URL elsewhere on the Web, hoping to get the benefits of image hosting while using my bandwidth and server space instead of their own. This practice is variously known as “hot-linking,” “embedding,” or “bandwidth theft.” There are two ways I can go on that. I can attempt to prevent you from doing it, or I can accept that you will attempt to do it no matter what I say, and then work out a way to turn it to my advantage. Other services, like astro.com’s, try to prevent hot-linking
