HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Images Are Special

Image files are multimedia elements that you can reference with anchors in your document for separate download and display by the browser. But, unlike other multimedia, standard HTML and XHTML have an explicit provision for image display "inline" with the text, and images can serve as intricate maps of hyperlinks. That's because there is some consensus in the industry concerning image file formats—specifically, GIF, PNG, and JPEG—and the graphical browsers have built-in decoders that integrate those image types into your document.^[*]

Inline Images

The HTML/XHTML tag for inline images is <img>; its required src attribute is the image file that you want to display in the document. [<img>, 5.2.6]

The browser separately loads images and places them into the text flow as though the image were some special, albeit sometimes very large, character. Normally, that means the browser aligns the bottom of the image to the bottom of the current line of text. You can change that with the special CSS align property, whose value you set to put the image at the top, middle, or bottom of adjacent text. Examine Figures 2-2 through 2-4 for the image alignment you prefer. Of course, wide images may take up the whole line and hence break the text flow. You can also place an image by itself, by including preceding and following division, paragraph, or line-break tags.

Figure 2-2. An inline ...