Graphics

Skills Covered
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
Interlacing
JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group)

Sending text over the Internet is just old fashioned e-mail. People have been doing it for decades! When you can include pictures, your message can be much more informative (a picture is worth a thousand words).

Objectives
After this lesson, you will be able to:
Identify the graphic formats for the World Wide Web.
Discuss key points to consider when including graphics in WWW documents.
Download a graphic file to your computer.
Use the correct HTML format for including pictures in your web page.

The Web's Graphic Format
There are numerous file formats for computer graphics... PICT, GIF, TIFF, PNG, EPS, BMP, PCX, JPEG.

The way a web browser displays graphics in HTML format indicates the location of a graphic file in a single format that can be interpreted by different types of computers. For example, when the information in that format is received by your Macintosh computer, the web browser knows to display it as a picture format for Macintosh. However, when that same information is received by your Windows browser, it is displayed as a Windows graphic.

In technical jargon, we would say that this picture format is platform independent. HTML itself is platform independent, since plain text characters can be understood by any computer.