<img src="ADDRESS">Just like the hyperlink, the
<img> tag
requires an ADDRESS (or source) for where the image is.
So, in principle, you can have any image from any webpage
in the world appear on your web page, simply by giving the
right address. However, this is a serious breach of etiquette,
because to be able to load your page, the user's web browser
also has to go out across the web, connect to some other machine,
and download the image. It's much faster, and more polite, to
keep the images that you are going to use local.
That being said, here's an exaple of an image, our very own department logo:
You can see that is the most basic way to bring up an image. There
are a bunch of other attributes that can be given to the
<img> tag, but the only ones that you really
need are the alt and align attributes.
Let's talk about the alt attribute first. This
attribute can be set equal to a text string, and will be displayed
if the browser can't load the image for some reason. I'll force it
to do this in the following example by giving it a filename that
doesn't exist:
Its always a good practice to put some info in the alt
attribute for every image that you put up. That way people
who surf the web without autoloading of images over their modems
can tell what kind of an image it is and if its worth the wait.
Additionally, for deaf users, their specialized browsers can
give them the text in the alt tag but couldn't
really give them an image.
Next we'll talk about the align attribute. The
align attribute is used to align your image with
respect to your text. Here are the possibilities:
align=top
align=bottom
align=middle
align=left
align=right
You don't always need to use the align attribute,
but it can be helpful sometimes. Images can be placed anywhere,
and in the LPL web pages, we often use Tables to organize images
and text.