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Images as hypertext links

Images, either alone or combined with text, can be used as the anchors for hypertext links. Clicking on the image with a mouse causes the browser to send a request to the server for the linked document or resource. This is done by placing the image element within the anchor element:

    <A HREF="link-url"><IMG SRC="image-url"></A>

This type of construct is commonly used to display a small thumbnail image, which is a link to a larger and therefore more bandwidth-hungry version of the same image, thus allowing the user to choose whether to use network resources to display what might be a very large file. Since there is no way for the user to know the size of the linked image file, it is good practice to indicate this in parentheses in the original documents.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.