We’re going to divert ourselves here for a moment and discuss images. Netscape Composer does not itself edit images. You will need a separate application for working with images. You can find very good shareware or open source image editors (I like GraphicConverter and GIMP) or you can use commercial image editors such as Adobe Photoshop.
Always work from an original, high quality image. Some image formats are “lossy”. They’re like a video tape that’s been recorded from another tape, that’s been recorded from another tape, etc., for every time you’ve edited the image. If your image editor has a native format, such as Adobe Photoshop does, use that format. Otherwise, the PNG format is a very good format for storing your original files.
Always work from your original, and then save the original down to your web format.
- Images: Format
- Different image formats are optimized for different kinds of images. The different formats “compress” the image to give it a smaller file size. Smaller file sizes mean faster download times.
- Images: File size
- You should keep the file size of your images as small as is reasonable. The smaller your image file sizes, the faster your page will load. When you are working from your hard drive, even extremely large images will appear to load quickly, because your hard drive is very fast. If you are testing your pages on a high-speed Internet line, that is close to the server, large images may also appear to load quickly. But for people on slower connections…
- Acquiring Images
- You can get images for the web by scanning in photographs that you have, by drawing them yourself, or by getting them from free image sites on the web. You can do a search for “free clip-art” or “free images” on http://www.google.com/ to find free image sites. If you find a free image on the web that you wish to use, move the mouse over the image. Control-click the image (on Windows, use the right mouse button) until a menu pops up. Choose “Save…
- Inserting images
- Now that you know about images, it is time to insert some images into your web page. You should have your PNG, GIF, or JPEG file sized correctly and ready to go. Place the image in the same folder as the web page you want to place it on. If you have lots of images, you may want to make an “images” folder in that folder, and place all of your images in that folder. But one way or another the image must be “inside” the same folder that the web page…
- Aligning images with text
- The options for “At the top”, “At the bottom”, and “In the center” all treat the image as if it were a standard character. Generally it will be a very large single character, but it’s still just a character in the line of text. If the text wraps to another line, it must clear the bottom of the image. For example, if we decide to put the image to the left of our paragraph instead of to the left of our headline, we will see a lot of white space in…
- Sizing Images
- Netscape Composer allows you to change the size of your image right in the image attributes window, on the “Dimensions” tab. Normally, you don’t want to do this. If you change the size of the image so that it’s larger than it “really” is, the quality of the image will suffer considerably. If you change the size of the image so that it’s smaller than it really is, you are foregoing considerable savings in file size. As long as the image only…
- Keeping Images With Pages
- When you insert an image into a web page, you are not really inserting the image. You are inserting a link to the image. This means that when you upload your web page, or if you copy the web page onto a disk to give to someone else, the image will not come along with it unless you upload it or copy it yourself. This is different from most word processors, where inserting an image inserts the image into the actual file. The easiest way to give…
