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4.4 IMG (In-line Images) Element

The IMG element allows an image document to be inserted within an HTML document. The purpose is to allow pictures to be included within a document and presented with the text, as opposed to having hypertext links that retrieve and display images in a separate viewing window. This element can not be used to include other HTML text within a given document.

Images can be included within a hypertext anchor: thus you can make an image icon behave as a button to access other documents. An example is given at the bottom of this document.

The IMG element is empty, meaning there is no closing </IMG>. It has three attributes:

SRC="image_url"
SRC give the URL of the image document. The naming scheme is the same as for hypertext links: thus relative URLs such as SRC="foo.gif" or SRC="../foo.gif" are commonly used. At present you can only inline GIF images and X-bitmaps (standard extensions are .gif, .xbm, .xpm). This attribute must be present.
ALIGN=BOTTOM (MIDDLE, or TOP)
ALIGN tells the browser how to align the image with the neighbouring text. BOTTOM aligns the bottom of the image with the bottom of text, and is the default. MIDDLE aligns the middle of the image with the middle of text, and TOP aligns the top of the image with the top of text. This attribute is optional.
ALT="alternative text"
Some browsers cannot display images: The optional ALT attribute allows you to specify a text alternative to the image, for use by text-only browsers. This attribute is optional.
ISMAP
Many servers and browsers also support the ISMAP attribute. This attribute marks the image as an active image map. This allows the user to click the mouse over the image and have different regions of the image cause different actions. See ISMAP to find out more about how to do this.

Examples

Look at Section 4.4.1 to see some examples of the use of the IMG element.

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