HTML Basics : Images and Web Pages

Images are crucial part of a website. So it’s important to discuss about the use of images in your web page. In this article we would be discussing about some common areas that are associated with the use of images in a web page.

Image optimisation

These days, when high speed internet is accessible from every place imaginable, image optimisation is not really that important. But just to clear fundamentals and to get along with some basic conventions image optimisation is discussed here. Remember the following five points and you will do fine with your web pages:

1. Use the JPEG format i.e., Joint Photograph Expert Group extension for the photographs.
2. The use of PNG format is appreciated for the artworks.
3. Try to avoid the GIF format as much as you can. PNG is preferable than the GIF format images for the HTML web pages.
4. Never try to optimise images too much such that it loses it basic essence. Reading your image editing software manual might help in this process.
5. Keep your image’s dimensions reasonable. They should not be supersized images. Remember, your camera saves images as high resolution TIFF or JPEG images. They are really huge.

Common image formats on the internet

The three primary image formats on the internet are as follows:

1. JPEG: JPEG stands for the Joint Photographic Expert Group.
2. PNG: PNG stands for the Portable Network Graphics.
3. GIF: Graphics Interchange format is abbreviated as GIF.

JPEG image format is recommended for saving photographs. There are many reasons because of which JPEG is preferred over other image formats for storing images. Unless you are dealing with animations, don’t use the GIF format for any type of images in your web page. Instead try to use PNG format. The PNG format is more modern image format that has rich colour support, advanced compression schemes, 24 bit colour levels or depths, adaptive transparency and several other features that makes it much better than the GIF image format.

Today image optimisation is only used when dealing with the images from a digital camera. Digital cameras have made taking photos, uploading them to computers and sharing them on the internet easier than ever before. But there is a problem with the direct use of the images from the digital cameras in the web pages. Typically, digital camera’s sharing application uses large, high resolution TIFFs or JPEGs image formats. These types of images are way too large to display on the internet. In order to properly display images on the internet, you must reduce the size and dimension of the images captured from a digital camera.

Thus, image optimisation is of little use when considering the high speed internet of today’s world. But still it is important. In the subsequent articles, we would be studying more about the use of images in the HTML web pages. Topics such as adding images to the web page, creating hyperlinks with or without thumbnails and how to create image maps will be discussed in the upcoming articles.