Chapter 11
Images

Although it is not the mis­sion of this book to teach you HTML5, or even a por­tion there­of, it does seem worth cov­er­ing cer­tain media you can use beyond the lim­i­ta­tions imposed by print­ed books and ebooks. One of those medi­ums is images. A book with­out images is like a turkey with­out the dressing.

Although you are lim­it­ed on oth­er plat­forms such as Apple iTunes, Google Play, and Ama­zon Kin­dle as to the dig­i­tal size of your pub­li­ca­tion, you have no lim­i­ta­tion with a web­book. And images take up a lot more dig­i­tal stor­age space than text. For instance, if you’re using high-res­o­lu­tion pho­tographs in a trav­el book, your lim­i­ta­tion on the nor­mal pub­lish­ing plat­forms would prob­a­bly be less than a few dozen pho­tographs for ebooks or bookapps dis­trib­uted on iTunes, Google Play, or Ama­zon. You can include hun­dreds or thou­sands in a webbook.

Printed Books

In print­ed books, images are severe­ly lim­it­ed. First, they take extra pages mak­ing the pro­duc­tion of a book more expen­sive. Sec­ond, col­or images may require that the entire book be print­ed in col­or mak­ing the pro­duc­tion of the book very expen­sive. Third, if only the images are print­ed in col­or, they can­not be inte­grat­ed into the book where appro­pri­ate but must appear as a group on sev­er­al con­sec­u­tive col­or pages some­where in the book.

In a web­book, you can have hun­dreds of high-res­o­lu­tion pho­tographs, or how­ev­er many you need. But pho­tographs are not the only dig­i­tal images. There are charts, illus­tra­tions, car­toons, fine art­works, and the like, all of which you can present in your web­book in what­ev­er vol­ume you desire. Here’s the markup for images:

<img src=” “ alt=” “>

The image markup has six attrib­ut­es that you can use to manip­u­late how the image appears in the text. The src and alt attrib­ut­es are required. The src is the URL of the image file. The alt is the text dis­played in browsers that do not dis­play images.

Note that you get a twofer here. You not only get the image into your web­page, but you also get an oppor­tu­ni­ty to enhance your SEO. You can use the alt attribute to add what­ev­er text you want to the image. (If some­one’s brows­er does not show images, what­ev­er you put in the alt attribute will appear as text in their browser.)

This is a holdover from the ancient days when some browsers did not dis­play images. Vir­tu­al­ly all browsers today dis­play images, and the alt attribute has become obso­lete for its orig­i­nal pur­pose. Nonethe­less, it can help you with your SEO. Sim­ply put a descrip­tion of your pho­to­graph with your most impor­tant key­words into the alt attribute, and the search engine robots will find it and use it to rank your webpage.

I would be remiss if I did not men­tion that peo­ple love images. Images intel­li­gent­ly used can enhance enter­tain­ment, edu­ca­tion, learn­ing, train­ing, and infor­ma­tion­al pre­sen­ta­tions. There is every rea­son to use more of them rather than less of them. Thus, the web­book presents you with a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty to do some­thing that’s lim­it­ed in ebooks and more expen­sive to pub­lish in print­ed books.