>It might be a neat trick to get the href images to flow with F2STR. I thought I had it hitting in a CGI thing I wrote aeons ago, but your explanation may explain that - or CGI might be a completely different animal.

That's simply not how HTTP user agents work. You send IMG tags, LINK tags, etc. with *references* to URIs of other resources (images, style sheets, etc.), and the *client* then initiates further requests to get them (or not, depending on caching, user preferences, etc.).