HTML Lesson 4: How to Insert an Image in HTML

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Brad

As you recall from Lesson 1 (What is XHTML?), adding a paragraph in XHTML is as simple as wrapping text in <p> and </p> tags. Adding an image, however, is a little more complicated.

Follow Along

Before we continue, I encourage you to follow along by copying and pasting today’s code into your own XHTML document (or the page we created in Lesson 2: How To Create and Save Your First XHTML File by Hand). This will allow you to edit the text, and refresh the file in your web browser as we make edits. This will greatly enhance your learning ability.

A Funny Dog

Let’s pretend we have an image of a dog on our computer saved as “funny-dog.jpg” and we want to insert it into a webpage; this is the code we would use:

1	<img src="funny-dog.jpg" />

Let’s analyze this code. First, <img> is the code for creating an image element. Next, the letters “src” are used as an attribute (which you learned about in Lesson 3: Attributes and Values) and stand for “source”. Basically, we need to provide the web browser with avalue to the source of the image. Naturally, the value for the source attribute is “funny-dog.jpg”. This example assumes your image file is located in the same directory as your XHTML file. If, for example, you had your image file inside a folder named “images” your code would look like this:

1	<img src="images/funny-dog.jpg" />

Self Closing Elements

As you can see, in both code examples so far there has not been an ending </img> tag, because the image code is a “self closing” element. This is because unlike a paragraph, we won’t have a plethora of content inside our <img> element, but rather a single image. The/> at the end of the code tells the web browser to end the image element.

There is one additional bit of code we must add before we are finished. We must assign an “alt” attribute and value to our image. The “alt” attribute stands for “alternative” and is used to provide a text-based alternative for viewers incase the image will not load, or if they are visually impaired. Here is what our code will look like:

1	<img src="funny-dog.jpg" alt="A funny dog sitting on the grass. " />