Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Adding Graphics

It’s safe to say that the creators of the Internet never imagined it would look the way it does today—thick with pictures, ads, and animated graphics. They designed a meeting place for leading academic minds; we ended up with something closer to a Sri Lankan bazaar. But no one’s complaining, because the Web would be an awfully drab place without graphics.

In this chapter, you’ll master the art of Web images. You’ll learn how to add graphics to a Web page and to position them perfectly. You’ll also consider what it takes to prepare pictures for the Web—or to find good alternatives online.

Understanding Images

To understand how images work on the Web, you need to know two things:

• They don’t reside in your XHTML files. Instead, you store each one as a separate file.

• To display pictures on a page, you use the <img> element in your XHTML document.

You’ll use images throughout your site, even in spots where you might think ordinary text would work just fine (see Figure 7-1).

Tip

If you can’t tell whether a piece of content on a page is a graphic, try right-clicking it. If it’s an image, browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox give you a Save Picture As option in a pop-up menu.

Figure 7-1. It’s easy to underestimate how many graphics sit on an average page. Besides just ordinary pictures, adornments like bullets, logos, text headings, and colorful borders are most likely ...