Let's say I have < img src="http://www.always-going-to-be-absolute.com/images/thisimage1.jpg" width= "some px" /> (only a .jpg or .gif). With only the width specified, are there any (any!) circumstances under which the height and width of the image may not scale accordingly, or may not scale at all, assuming there is no CSS or other code affecting it? I can't think of any circumstances (and research doesn't bring up any), but I'd like to be sure by running this by some people who have more experience than I do.
thanks!
No there are not. However, note that is it quicker to load an image of the correct size.
If any other css code or anything else is not affecting it, then I don't think there should be a problem. Try using images of correct sizes though. Helps reduce loading time and preserve quality of images as well. Try it out and if you get any scaling or other problems, you know where to ask, right? ^_^
It looks like you're scaling the images through width. From section 13.7 of the HTML 4 specification:
All IMG and OBJECT attributes that concern visual alignment and presentation have been deprecated in favor of style sheets.
I think the only two problems you may have here are:
Small images: If the image is 10x10px and is scaled to fit a 1000x1000px container, it will be pretty hard to make out what the image is supposed to be.
Thin images: If your container is 1000x1000px and the image is 250x25px, scaling the image to fit the container will result in a 1000x100px image.
OR, is there a way to at least determine the width of an image from a URL.jpg (if it's not specified in the html) without downloading the image?
In front-end JavaScript you can simply:
img.clientWidth;
img.clientHeight;
On the back-end, PHP has a getimagesize() function which returns height and width. I imagine other languages also have similar functions.
Related
I found a similar question here, with the answer: "you should always define the width and height in the image tag." But it is from 2009.
In the meantime, many things has changed on frontend. We are all doing responsive page design now, for many devices and sizes simultaneously (mobile, tablet, desktop...).
So, I wonder is it still necessary to specify the width and height attributes, and for what reason (for responsive, page speed, SEO...)?
An img element has width and height attributes, but they're not required under any DOCTYPE.
Width and height attributes were only 'required' or relevant to reserve the space on the page and prevent the page moving around as it loads - which is important. This can be achieved using CSS instead providing the CSS loads quickly enough - it is likely to load before the images anyway, so all should be good.
It is also possible (and valid) to specify just one attribute, width or height and the browser will calculate the omitted value in order to maintain the correct aspect ratio.
You can specify percent values in the attributes if required. You don't need to use CSS for this, if that is what you are implying.
Also, it is relevant to add - Under HTML5 the width and height can only take a pixel value, in other words a valid non-negative integer.
Whether you use the width and height attributes can depend on your design. If you have lots of differently sized images, do you want to lump all the dimensions in the CSS or include them with the img?
YES, you want to declare the width and the height of an image in 2016.
To make them retina-ready
If you want your image to be retina-ready, you should define a width and an height lower than the actual pixels. If the image is 800x600 specify <img width="400" height="300" />.
To avoid page jump
Without the width and the height the image does not know how large it is, which causes an unwanted jump in the page as it loads (it reflows). Declaring height and width solves this problem.
Note that:
Images with a defined width and height can still be responsive. Simply add max-width and max-height to your CSS. This will cause the image to scale down (not up) when it does not fit the screen (see this sweet retina-ready, responsive kitten). Defining a min-width and min-height will do the opposite.
Adding a huge amount of compression to your JPG (around 50%) to keep the file size low is recommended when you use a single (relative large) image for all screen sizes.
Well, the basic answer to this question (as with most coding issues) is this: it depends on the situation at hand.
I would say that the “best practice” of always specifying the height and width attributes of images making a significant difference to page rendering speeds hark back to the days when designers laid out their websites using tables and spacer GIFs. We have come a long way since then.
An indication for the future is the introduction of the new picture element being drafted into HTML. The picture element is effectively a wrapper for the existing img element, which allows you to specify several images of different sizes via a source element, and the user-agent itself actually determines which version is used.
<picture>
<source media="(min-width: 64em)" src="high-res.jpg">
<source media="(min-width: 37.5em)" src="med-res.jpg">
<source src="low-res.jpg">
<img src="fallback.jpg" alt="This picture loads on non-supporting browsers.">
<p>Accessible text.</p>
</picture>
As you can see from this example code above (taken from the Intel Developer Zone's article on the HTML5 picture element) there are no height or width attributes on the img element itself.
Here are a selection of resources that will help you to decide the most appropriate method of declaring image sizes:
Responsive Images Community Group
W3C Working Group Note: Use Cases and Requirements for Standardizing Responsive Images
WHATWG HTML Living Standard: The picture element
Good standards are always worth a recommendation. With a little extra code it's quite easy to merge static (px) values of the img tag and generic (em, %) values supplied by CSS. And simpler still, get rid of the img tag altogether and set the picture as background of a div with a unique ID. If you have multiple images, use sprites and assign each picture to its corresponding div. Your mark-up sources would then look something like <div id="image_001"></div> - that's all. Scales all by itself; no need for bloatware like JQuery, etc.
If we're talking 'bout responsive, you may use bootstrap (if not, start doing this).
When working with images, you should add the class img-responsive, this will modify the width of the image if necessary and the height will be auto, so if width decreases, height will decrease too.
You will always have an image that keeps the same % of its container and will never loose the aspect ratio.
There's no relation with SEO and image size declarations.
Page speed will be the same always, so if the image is 800 x 600 px, you'll load the full image, even if you declare it as 60 x 40 px.
You must think that, even using img-responsive, the max width and height of this image will be the real size of the image. So if we have a 800 x 600 px image, it will not enlarge it (because it'll become loosing quality).
So in 2016, it's recommendable to NOT declare height and width of an image. Instead use bootstrap's img-responsive class, other responsive framework class that gets the same result, or hand-made the proper jquery and css to reach the same.
Hope it helps!
Yes, It is still relevant to specify width and height attribute on images in HTML.
Images often take longer to load than the HTML code that makes up the rest of the page. It is, therefore, a good idea to specify the size of
the image so that the browser can render the rest of the text on the
page while leaving the right amount of space for the image that is
still loading.
Hence, specifying width and height attribute on image will improve the webpage performance by protecting from delay in loading.
Yes, it is necessary to add height and width attributes to the img tag along with the src and alt attributes to prevent page-jumping. When our page loads, the specified space will be preserved for the image so that the it can occupy that place peacefully.
But, there is another problem that will arise here Responsiveness.
Once we give height and width attribute to img tag, the image will tend to stay in the same height for all screen-sizes which will make the image to shrink.
To avoid this, we need to add height: auto; to the image in the CSS file.
I'm using an application called iDashboards, and in it there is a feature I can add called a ViFrame that takes very limited HTML to create a custom frame.
My knowledge of HTML is already pretty limited and with no output feedback, it's hard to use trial and error as a tactic.
I'm trying to display an image. The image changes dependent on the person that's selected in the app. The selection is taken care of by itself, but the problem is that the size of the pictures vary. I'm trying to display the image so that it has a definite height and a scaled width.
Displays the full size image. The HEIGHT element doesn't seem to constrain anything. If I add a WIDTH tag it works but the scaling would be messed up. Is there any way to do what I want?
The way I see it, I have two options I can think of:
1. Make every image in the library a square and then specify square dimensions so no distortion
2. Somehow retrieve the original height and width into variables in HTML and specify both tags with height being constant and width being an expression of the ratio between height and width. None of which I know is even possible. Is it? I don't think it allows tags either to go into JavaScript.
Sorry about my very basic knowledge in HTML, be gentle.
Are you using one object and changing the image or using many images and changing which one is displayed? Any way you could try to use width:YOUR_VALUE_HERE; height:auto in your css document, which should keep them all in the same ratio.
Set a particular class on the IMG tag:
<img class='constrained_img' src='/path/to/img.png'>
In your CSS/Stylesheet:
.constrained_img {
max-width:100px;
max-height:100px;
}
That should keep your height and width to no larger than 100px in this case. Any further work you'd need to do server-side processing (a la PHP's getimagesize()), or use a 3rd-party library (I've used Joseph Lencioni's SLIR to good effect), or muck around with JavaScript (which isn't impossible, but off the top of my head I'm not sure how I'd go about it).
I know this question is asked before.
Most of them are 5-6 years old, so at the latest browsers do you add or don't you add the height and width of the original img size?
<img class="stars-img" src="https://cdn4.iconfinder.com/data/icons/small-n-flat/24/star-128.png" height="128px" width="128px">
or
<img class="stars-img" src="https://cdn4.iconfinder.com/data/icons/small-n-flat/24/star-128.png">
The resizing of the img will still be done with css so it's not about separation styling from the html
tl;dr: it's no impact on loading time.
The benefit in adding the width and height to the image tag is that the browser will place floating text according to the image size and avoid "jumping" the text if the pictures is ready with loading.
So it makes sense to add the dimensions if you know them. If you're simply adding dummy values, than it's useless and should not be done.
Speed wise it's practically no impact. A reasonable width="1000px" height="800px" has 29 Bytes.
With a downstream of 24.0 Mbit/s that's a delay of 9.667 microseconds (in this time, light travels 2898 meters). With a 56kbit modem, it's 4.143 milliseconds per picture.
Even if you have 10.000 pictures on one page, the delay would only be 96.67 milliseconds (41.43 seconds with 56kbit). And it would cost a lot more time to load all the images.
If you're still going to style with CSS, is there any benefit in adding it in the first place?
If you're concerned about performance, you'd be better off having the images as the size required on upload, so that you're not loading bigger images than you need.
You should specify the size of the imgages if possible, so that the browser knows how much space the image will need. That prevents the browser from needing to move elements around to make room for images that appear.
Normally it won't matter if you set the size in the HTML or in the CSS, but setting it in the CSS may allow you to specify the same size for multiple images. Also, as the CSS is cached it makes sense to move styling there to reduce the HTML size.
This question already has answers here:
Should I specify height and width attributes for my IMGs in HTML?
(5 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
Is it better coding practice to define an images size in the img tag's width and height attributes?
<img src="images/academia_vs_business.png" width="740" height="382" alt="" />
Or in the CSS style with width/height?
<img src="images/academia_vs_business.png" style="width:740px; height:382px;" alt="" />
Or both?
<img src="images/academia_vs_business.png" width="740" height="382" style="width:740px; height:382px" alt="" />
I'm going to go against the grain here and state that the principle of separating content from layout (which would justify the answers that suggest using CSS) does not always apply to image height and width.
Each image has an innate, original height and width that can be derived from the image data. In the framework of content vs layout, I would say that this derived height and width information is content, not layout, and should therefore be rendered as HTML as element attributes.
This is much like the alt text, which can also be said to be derived from the image. This also supports the idea that an arbitrary user agent (e.g. a speech browser) should have that information in order to relate it to the user. At the least, the aspect ratio could prove useful ("image has a width of 15 and a height of 200"). Such user agents wouldn't necessarily process any CSS.
The spec says that the width and height attributes can also be used to override the height and width conveyed in the actual image file. I am not suggesting they be used for this. To override height and width, I believe CSS (inline, embedded or external) is the best approach.
So depending on what you want to do, you would specify one and/or the other. I think ideally, the original height and width would always be specified as HTML element attributes, while styling information should optionally be conveyed in CSS.
The historical reason to define height/width in tags is so that browsers can size the actual <img> elements in the page even before the CSS and/or image resources are loaded. If you do not supply height and width explicitly the <img> element will be rendered at 0x0 until the browser can size it based on the file. When this happens it causes a visual reflow of the page once the image loads, and is compounded if you have multiple images on the page. Sizing the <img> via height/width creates a physical placeholder in the page flow at the correct size, enabling your content to load asynchronously without disrupting the user experience.
Alternately, if you are doing mobile-responsive design, which is a best practice these days, it's quite common to specify a width (or max-width) only and define the height as auto. That way when you define media queries (e.g. CSS) for different screen widths, you can simply adjust the image width and let the browser deal with keeping the image height / aspect ratio correct. This is sort of a middle ground approach, as you may get some reflow, but it allows you to support a broad range of screen sizes, so the benefit usually outweighs the negative.
Finally, there are times when you may not know the image size ahead of time (image src might be loaded dynamically, or can change during the lifetime of the page via script) in which case using CSS only makes sense.
The bottom line is that you need to understand the trade-offs and decide which strategy makes the most sense for what you're trying to achieve.
While it's ok to use inline styles, your purposes may better be served by including an external CSS file on the page. This way you could define a class of image (i.e. 'Thumbnail', 'Photo', 'Large', etc) and assign it a constant size. This will help when you end up with images requiring the same placement across multiple pages.
Like this:
In your header:
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" />
Your HTML:
<img class="thumbnail" src="images/academia_vs_business.png" alt="" />
In css/style.css:
img.thumbnail {
width: 75px;
height: 75px;
}
If you'd like to use inline styles though, it's probably best to set the width and height using the style attribute for the sake of readability.
Definitely not both. Other than that I'd have to say it's a personal preference. I'd use css if I had many images the same size to reduce code.
.my_images img {width: 20px; height:20px}
In the long term CSS may win out due to HTML attribute deprecation and more likely due to the growth of vector image formats like SVG where it can actually make sense to scale images using non-pixel based units like % or em.
<img id="uxcMyImageId" src"myImage" width="100" height="100" />
specifying width and height in the image tag is a good practice..this way when the page loads there is space allocated for the image and the layout does not suffer any jerks even if the image takes a long time to load.
Option a.
Simple straight fwd. What you see is what you get easy to make calculations.
Option b. Too messy to do this inline unless you want to have a site that can stretch. IE if you used the with:86em however modern browsers seem to handle this functionally adequately for my purposes.. . Personally the only time that i would use something like this is if i were to create a thumbnails catalogue.
/*css*/
ul.myThumbs{}
ul.myThumbs li {float:left; width:50px;}
ul.myThumbs li img{width:50px; height:50px;border:0;}
<!--html-->
<ul><li>
<img src="~/img/products/thumbs/productid.jpg" alt="" />
</li></ul>
Option c. Too messy to maintain.
I'm using contentEditable to allow rich text editing in my app. I don't know how it slips through, but when an image is inserted, and then resized (by dragging the anchors on its side), it generates something like this:
<img style="width:55px;height:55px" width="100" height="100" src="pic.gif" border=0/>
(subsequent testing shown that inserted images did not contain this "rogue" style attr+param).
When rendered by the browser (IE7), the width and height in the style overrides the img width/height param (so the image is shown like how I wanted it.. resized to 55px x 55px. So everything went well so it seems.
When I output the page to a ms-word document via setting the mime type application/msword or pasting the browser rendering to msword document, all the images reverted back to its default size. I finally found out that msword is discarding the style and using the img width and height tag (which has the value of the original image size).
Took me a while to found this out. Anyway... I've coded a javascript function to traverse all tags and "transferring" the img style.width and style.height values into the img.width and img.height, then clearing both the values in style, before I proceed saving this piece of html/richtext data into the database.
cheers.
opps.. my answer is.. no. leave both attributes directly under img, rather than style.
I just finished reading YSlow recommendation to always define the image dimensions (height/width) to improve HTML rendering performance.
However, I don't know the image dimension I'm linking too.
What I do know is that the height will never be larger than 200px and the width will never be larger than 300px
Would I be a benefit if I defined (CSS) :
img {max-height: 200px; max-width: 300px}
For HTML performance rendering?
No, setting the max-width and max-height doesn't improve the performance.
The reason for specifying the width and height of images is that the browser will know exactly how much space the image will take up. If you leave the image size unspecified, the browser has to reflow the layout when the image loads.
You can see this nasty effect on some pages, where the page is first loaded with no placeholders for images, and then the contents jumps around making place for the images as they load.
If you can't specify the size of some images, don't worry too much about it. Just make sure that the layout behaves nicely when the images load, and don't jump around too much.
Setting the max height and width of an image in the css will make the img tag resize the img based on the contraints but if you are using a backend scripting language like asp.net or php you an use their img libraries to scale the image on the server side an either save then to the hard drive to use later or resize on the fly.
You can check out http://shiftingpixel.com/2008/03/03/smart-image-resizer/ for php as a starter
Or if you are using .NET you can check out this link http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2009/04/02/resizing-images-without-loss-of-quality.aspx
Images with different proportions would not look good, since they would be scaled. I would not recommend this.
In this case I would definitely not set the height and width of the image since you don't know what it is going to be. If you know what the size is going to be then setting is good because it will cut down on the amount of repainting and reflow that the browser has to do when rendering a page.
The less it has to do then the better the performance will be on the client side because you are not making the browser work too hard.
Stoyan Stefanov explained it really well in a recent blog post
I think You'd rather want to wrap that <img> into a <span> or <div> element with max-height and max-width set. Also, it ( span or div ) should have overflow:hidden set so the image doesn't go out of the div's range.
It definitelly isn't recommended to set these setting directly to image because You'll get different and slower rendering in different browsers.