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Images

Things might seem a little bland and boring with all of this text formatting. Of course, the web is not just about text, it is a multi-media extravaganza and the most common form of sparkle is the image.

The img tag is used to put an image in an HTML document and it looks like this:


<img src="http://www.htmldog.com/badge1.gif" width="120" height="90" alt="HTML Dog">

The src attribute tells the browser where to find the image. Like the a tag, this can be absolute, as the above example demonstrates, but is usually relative. For example, if you create your own image and save it as “alienpie.jpg” in a directory called “images” then the code would be <img src="images/alienpie.jpg"...

The width and height attributes are necessary because if they are excluded, the browser will tend to calculate the size as the image loads, instead of when the page loads, which means that the layout of the document may jump around while the page is loading.

The alt attribute is the alternative description. This is an accessibility consideration, providing meaningful information for users who are unable to see the image (if they are visually impaired, for example).

Note that, like the br tag, because the img element does not enclose any content, no closing tag is required.