A web page with all text and no pictures isn’t much fun. The Web’s explosion into mass popularity was due in part to the fact that there were images on the page. Before images, the Internet was a text-only tundra.

Images appear on web pages in two ways: embedded in the inline content or as background images. Background images are added using Cascading Style Sheets and are talked about at length in Chapter 13. With the emergence of standards-driven design and its mission to keep all matters of presentation out of the document structure, there has been a shift away from using inline images for purely decorative purposes. See the sidebar Images Move to the Background on the following page for more information on this trend.