14.8. Basic Object Model Plus Images

A very short time after Internet Explorer 3 was released, Netscape released Navigator 3 with an object model that built upon the original version. A handful of existing objects—especially the window object—gained new properties, methods, and/or event handlers. Scripts could also communicate with Java applets as objects. But the biggest new object on the scene was the Image object and the array of image objects exposed to the document object.

Most of the properties for a Navigator 3 image object gave read-only access to values typically assigned to attributes in the <img> tag. But you could modify one property—the src property—after the page loaded. Scripts could swap out images within the fixed image rectangle. Although these new image objects didn't have mouse-related event handlers, nesting an image inside a link (which had onmouseover and new onmouseout event handlers) let scripts implement image rollovers to liven up a page.