HTML Basics 4: Images

Another tag which is very common is the <img> tag - this embeds image files into your page. Imagine how drab the internet would look if it weren't possible to display images on a web page!

Images are separate files which need to be stored online separately, and then embedded in the HTML document. You could almost think of the image tag as another kind of link tag - except that, instead of opening a new document on a new page, it displays an external file as part of the page you are looking at. It is important to remember that all image files you are using in your website need to be uploaded to your server as well - unless they are already stored on another website, and you are pointing your image tags there.

In another blog, I talked at some length about the image formats that are used on the web - the most common are .jpg and .gif. Say you have written a piece of text for your web page, but now want to embed a graphic logo on the top of the page, and a photo next to your first paragraph. Both things are achieved with the same tag. The logo will most likely be a .gif file - which is more suitable for text and line art - say it is called logo.gif, and it will be stored on your own web server, in a folder called "images". To embed it in your page, you need to write the following line of HTML: <img src="/images/logo.gif"> - that's it! The part after the img src, between the quotation marks, needs to contain not only the file name but also the *path* to your file - directions for the browser to where your image is stored. In the above example, the file would be stored in a folder called "images" which is in the main directory of your web page (more about directories some other time!).

What if you want to use an image that is stored on a different website though? Say, your brother has taken some beautiful photos on his last holiday in Switzerland and uploaded them to his personal website, and you have asked him to use one of them to decorate your essay about dairy farming in Europe. In this case, you use the same tag, but your path is the full url of the image - that is, ithe precise location on the internet where the image file is stored. So your brother's website is called www.mybigbrother.com", the image is called "cow.jpg", and it is stored in a folder called "images within the main directory of your brother's website. The tag would then read: <img src="http://www.mybigbrother.com/images/cow.jpg"> - as you can see, the tag itself hasn't changed, only the information where the image is located.

By default, images are displayed at the point in the site where the image tag is inserted, and displace text. If you would like to float it on the right or left side next to a piece of text, insert the following in your image tag: <img src="http://www.mybigbrother.com/images/cow.jpg" float="left"> - this will display your brother's photo of a beautiful Swiss dairy cow on the left side next to the paragraph of text that follows it in the HTML code.

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