How to use these images in your pages

How to download the images to your local disk

Before using these images in your own HTML pages, you should put them on your local disk. Please don't use them directly from here (by having a direct inline reference the images on this server in your pages) because this would increase the load on this server. Loading the images from your server will be faster for most people, and you won't have problems if I change the names of the files in the future.

So you have to download the images to your local disk. The way you do that depends on the browser you are using:

If you are using Mosaic, the easiest way to do it is to select Load To Local Disk in the Options menu, then click on the name of the item you want to download.
If you are using Netscape, you can click with the right mouse button on one image and select Save this Image As... in the menu that pops up. Or you can click on the name of the item (this will display the image on a separate page) and then select Save As... in the File menu.
With Arena, hmmm... as far as I know, you cannot save an image to disk. But of course, you can copy it from Arena's cache, in /tmp/http/.... It's a hack, but the next version of Arena will hopefully have an option for doing this easily.
I don't know about the other browsers, but there is probably an option to download an image in binary format to your local disk instead of displaying it. If you have some specific information for your favourite browser, you can e-mail it to me and I will add it here.

I suggest that you create a directory only for icons and images on your server, so that it will be easier for you to add a reference to the images from your own pages.

How to use the images in your pages

If you want to include some images in your pages, you have to know some HTML. If you have no idea of what HTML is, you'd better spend some time reading the World Wide Web FAQ and the HTML Specifications.

The simplest way to include an image in your page is with the following HTML tag:

	<IMG SRC="image_name.gif">

Remember that not all people are using graphical browsers. And some people who do use a browser capable of displaying inlined images may have this feature turned off. So it is always a good idea to provide a text-only alternative to your images. I always do that on my pages (where this is relevant). For example:

	<IMG SRC=&quo/gif/button_home.gif" ALT="[Home]">
	<IMG SRC="/gif/plus.gif" ALT="+">

You can also use the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes in the IMG tag. This tells the browser how much space it should allocate for the image on the page, before downloading it. Thanks to this, your browser can quickly display the page without having to wait for the images. Note: these attributes have been added to the HTML3 specification, so you can expect that most browsers will use them in the near future.

Since adding the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes to all images in your pages could take a long time, I suggest that you use the Perl script wwwimagesize, which does it automatically. I used it on my pages; it works rather well.

HTML 3.0 supports images in LI and HR tags. If your browser supports this feature, you should see red bullets in the list above. I expect that more and more browsers will support this in the near future, so it won't be necessary to use IMG's at the beginning of each line in a list. As an added bonus, this eliminates the need for an ALT tag and it will work correctly with text-only browsers (which have their own defaults for bullets and will ignore the images).