Page Content - HTML QuickStart Guide: The Simplified Beginner's Guide to HTML - page 58

Web Images
Web browsers are not capable of displaying every image type. As a matter of fact, they are
limited only to formats that offer very high compression rates in order to provide smaller im-
age sizes. This limits our options to only three formats: JPEG, GIF and PNG, and partially
SVG.
JPEG is suitable for photos that can tolerate some loss of quality. The JPEG format com-
presses an image's file size so that it downloads faster. It doesn't work well if the picture
contains text or line art.
GIF is suitable for graphics with very few colors like simple logos or clip art. It is limited
to 256 colors and therefore gives horrible results when used for compressing photographic
images.
PNG is a format created specifically for the web and is suitable for all kinds of images. It
doesn't always compress as well as JPEG, but it is particularly good for small, sharp graph-
ics, and it is used as a more powerful replacement for the GIF standard.
SVG is an up-and-coming standard for vector drawings with a number of advantages, in-
cluding small size and flexibility, as you can resize SVG images without losing detail or
producing blurry images. It is not supported by Internet Explorer versions 8 and earlier, so it
is not yet a viable choice for web graphics.