HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
connections. While the urge to add images to all of your documents may
be strong, sometimes pure text documents make more sense.
Documents being converted to the Web from other formats rarely have
embedded images. Reference materials and other serious content often
are completely usable in a text-only form.
You should create text-only documents when access speed is critical. If
you know that many users will be vying for your pages, you should ac-
commodate them by avoiding the use of images within your documents.
In some extreme cases, you might provide a home (leading) page that
lets readers decide between duplicate collections of your work: one con-
taining the images and another stripped of them. (The popular browsers
include special picture icons as placeholders for yet-to-be-downloaded
images, which can trash and muddle your document's layout into an un-
readable mess.)
Text is most appropriatesupporting images only, without frills and non-
essential graphicsif your documents are to be readily searchable by any
of the many web indexing services. These search engines almost always
ignore images. If you provide the major content of your pages with im-
ages, very little information about your documents will find its way into
the online web directories.
5.2.4. Speeding Image Downloads
There are several ways to reduce the overhead and delays inherent with
images, besides being very choosy about which to include in your docu-
ments:
Keep it simple
A full-screen, 24-bit color graphic, even when reduced in size by
digital compression with one of the standard formats, such as GIF,
PNG, or JPEG, is still going to be a network-bandwidth hog. First
decide between image integrity and size. Then acquire and use
the proper image-management tool that optimizes your image for
the application, particularly for special effects like GIF animation or
