I've learnt from somewhere a long time ago that specifying width and height for <img> elements in an HTML document speeds up and improves the page loading experience, and have generally kept to this practice:
<img src="" width="100" height="100" />
I'm now faced with a situation where I have a very large number of images on a single page, and I'd prefer to set the dimensions via CSS for both easier control and less repetitive HTML code:
.whatever img {width: 100px; height: 100px;}
Although this isn't a hugely serious issue, I'm wondering whether declaring the dimensions in CSS will have the same benefits as declaring the dimensions in HTML, or whether it ought to just be done in HTML directly?
Any insight would be welcome.
Thanks
I guess if the style sheet is available immediately, the image dimensions will immediately apply to the layout, which is the whole point of the exercise.
That guess is supported by Google's pagespeed rules. They seem to be fine with specifying images that way (emphasis mine):
Specifying a width and height for all images allows for faster rendering by eliminating the need for unnecessary reflows and repaints.
When the browser lays out the page, it needs to be able to flow around replaceable elements such as images. It can begin to render a page even before images are downloaded, provided that it knows the dimensions to wrap non-replaceable elements around. If no dimensions are specified in the containing document, or if the dimensions specified don't match those of the actual images, the browser will require a reflow and repaint once the images are downloaded. To prevent reflows, specify the width and height of all images, either in the HTML <img> tag, or in CSS.
The crucial difference between defining width and height in an attribute (as opposed to in CSS) is that it then becomes data, not a presentation parameter. Just imagine managing a following stylesheet
img[src='/images/tree.jpeg'] {
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
}
This needlessly entangles CSS with images. It also restricts adaptive layout, i.e. you can no longer have not-yet-loaded images take up correct space when one of their dimensions is inferred (e.g. width: 100%).
Also, consider CSS rules such as object-fit. Confusion about what width and heigth style properties then mean may arise.
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 recall it was long ago best practice to hardcode width and height for any image (generally so it allocated appropriate amount of space while loading), but now with most people on high speed and things generally more dynamic, what is the best practice for this? Is it still preferred that any content image have inline size set with html?
It doesn't matter if you set the size using HTML attributes or in a stylesheet, but you should still specify the size for images.
Eventhough images are loaded a lot faster nowadays, there is still a noticable delay between the page being displayed and the images pop up. It's still irritating when the layout of a page changes while the images are loading.
Yes, it is still preferred.
Plenty of people are not on high speed connections, and mobile is becoming more common.
It doesn't have to be inline - you can do it in external CSS. Some older browsers, if you don't specify the size, will just treat it as 0px;
Its always best to use CSS
You could hardcode the image height and width like this
.myimg img {
width: 10px;
height: 10px;
}
your image file itself should be the size you want it to display as, for the most part, if your concerned about slow loading especially! if you've got a 500X800 px image, that you only want to show as 100X200, scale it down! the file size will be much smaller so it will load faster :)
I would say yes if you want to make sure the white space is included in case of the image does not load or during document load. But no if you're scaling/resizing the image with those attributes, as its unnecessary load on the browser and causes image distortion.
If you are designing for cross browser compatibility, then you should at the very least specify the height and width in your CSS for the image itself. I have found inconsistency between FireFox, IE, Opera, etc if sizes are not specified specifically for the image. Due to the fact that each browser, not to mention different versions, handle adherence to HTML Standards differently. I have found that some browsers will do its best to extrapolate the HTML designers intent, while others just croak on the first error. I would also recommend em sizes, rather than pixel or %'s if you intend for the website to be viewed from a mobile device such as a tablet. I will say, however I have just started playing with HTML5 so I don't of the difference in HTML5 with respect to images.
I just answered a similar question on Wordpress Stack Exchange and also on Webmaster Stack. I am posting it here intending to clarify and help more people. (admins/moderators: if this isn't allowed, let me know the proper way to help).
doesn't really means you need to specify width and height in the html. What it means is that is you gotta reserve te proper space and when the image is loaded, the browser doens't have to reflow and repaint the page.
Besides, if you hardcode the dimensions, it kinds of defeats responsive behaviour. If your layout is not responsive, it's ok, but if you want to keep some responsiveness, you could use only CSS to achieve the results.
Most of time, using both width and max-width:100 will do the work, but this post from Smashing Magazine has an interesting technique: instead of using max-width:100%, you can use The Padding-Bottom Hack :
"With the technique, we define the height as a measure relative to the width. Padding and margin have such intrinsic properties, and we can use them to create aspect ratios for elements that do not have any content in them.
Because padding has this capability, we can set padding-bottom to be relative to the width of an element. If we also set height to be 0, we’ll get what we want. [...]
The next step is to place an image inside the container and make sure it fills up the container. To do this, we need to position the image absolutely inside the container, like so:"
.img-container {
padding-bottom: 56.25%; /* 16:9 ratio */
height: 0;
background-color: black;
}
.img-container img {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
}
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.
If I know the height and width of an image that I'm going to display with an image tag, should I include the height and width attributes, or just put the information in CSS? Or both?
Ex.
<img src="profilepic.jpg" height="64" width="64" />
or
<img src="profilepic.jpg" height="64" width="64" style="height: 64px; width: 64px;" />
or
<img src="profilepic.jpg" style="height: 64px; width: 64px;" />
According to Google Page Speed, you should always define the width and height in the image tag. But, to validate you can't use the style tag.
Also, you should always specify the same height and width as the actual image so the browser doesn't have to do any modifications to it like resizing.
I'd suggest doing it
<img src="..." height="20" width="50">
Edit: Someone suggested in the comments that it would be faster to just not add any attributes. According to Google (not that they are the end all of browser knowledge):
If no dimensions are specified in the containing document, or if the dimensions specified don't match those of the actual images, the browser will require a reflow and repaint once the images are downloaded. To prevent reflows, specify the width and height of all images, either in the HTML tag, or in CSS. - Read More
Given that, you could do the img dimensions in CSS, but to validate you would have to do it in a CSS file, not inline.
BTW, Google Page Speed is a series of tips focused on rendering the page faster.
You should always specify the height and the width of an image if only to help the browser lay the page out even before the image has been downloaded.
See 13.7 Visual presentation of images, objects, and applets in the HTML 4.01 spec:
The height and width attributes give
user agents an idea of the size of an
image or object so that they may
reserve space for it and continue
rendering the document while waiting
for the image data.
They are recommended and not required but you really, really should specify them ;-)
Also, please make sure the dimensions you specify actually match the dimensions of the image.
There is nothing worse than waiting for a page to download just because those 400x300(!) images are in reality more like 4000x3000 at 95% quality.
Yes you should specify the dimensions, so user agents know beforehand the size before the image fully loads so a layout couldn't potentially look broken if it relies on the loaded image's dimensions. In addition, if you're relying on IE6's filter property to insert png's you will need those dimensions.
This answer is now dated and I wouldn't make the same recommendation as I did back in 2009 with modern browsers.
It doesn't really matter which one you use, but I would recommend using only one.
I would recommend the attribute over the css solution as it is more compatible to older browsers and people with styles disabled.
Actually you don't have to specify them. Accordingly to w3c specification you use them only to override default values that are embedded in the image file and are read by the browser. When used will scale the original image to given sizes so putting them is making an extra calculus for the browser.
The height and width attributes give user agents an idea of the size of an image or object so that they may reserve space for it and continue rendering the document while waiting for the image data.
<img src="profilepic.jpg" alt="image" />
I've learned that it is a best practice to explicitly specify image dimensions. The browser can then already layout the page while still downloading the images themselves, thereby improving (percieved) page rendering time.
Is this true? And if so, is there a difference in specifying the dimensions in either HTML or CSS?
HTML: <img src="" width="200" height="100">
Inline CSS: <img src="" style="width: 200px; height: 100px">
External CSS: #myImage { width: 200px; height: 200px; }
According to Google Page Speed, it does not really matter if you specify the dimensions via CSS or HTML, as long as your CSS targets the IMG tag itself and not a parent element :
When the browser lays out the page, it needs to be able to flow around replaceable elements such as images. It can begin to render a page even before images are downloaded, provided that it knows the dimensions to wrap non-replaceable elements around. If no dimensions are specified in the containing document, or if the dimensions specified don't match those of the actual images, the browser will require a reflow and repaint once the images are downloaded. To prevent reflows, specify the width and height of all images, either in the HTML tag, or in CSS.
However, note that they advise not to resize the image using these dimensions, ie to always use the real dimensions :
Don't use width and height specifications to scale images on the fly. If an image file is actually 60 x 60 pixels, don't set the dimensions to 30 x 30 in the HTML or CSS. If the image needs to be smaller, scale it in an image editor and set its dimensions to match (see Optimize images for details.)
I tend to do it in the CSS. This is certainly a win when there are multiple images with the same dimensions (so you can do stuff like .comment img.usergroup { width: 16px; height: 16px; }), and have the same images subject to scaling in different stylesheets like user-selectable themes.
When you have completely independent images that are used on the site only once, it doesn't really make sense to abstract their size out to CSS, so the HTML version would probably be more appropriate there.
I think CSS gives you more flexibility: you can specifically set the width or height while setting the other dimension to auto. But when setting both dimensions, I don't thing there's a difference.
This does not answer your question directly, but I would not rely on the dimensions of your image for page layout. Instead include the image in a block level element. This relieves both the HTML and CSS from having to hold information that it really shouldn't as the image may change from time to time.
If you put a large image in an HTML page without dimensions, you should definitely notice the page layout shifting as the image is downloaded (over an internet connection, if not locally).
As per other answers, it doesn’t make much difference whether you do this in the HTML or the CSS.