Inlined Images for NCSA Mosaic
Introduction
NCSA Mosaic supports inlined
bitmaps and images in X bitmap and GIF formats. For example, here is
a bitmap: 
. Here is a bitmap serving as
an anchor to another document: 
.
How It Works
To embed a bitmap or image in a HTML document, use the IMG tag. For
example:
<![CDATA[
<IMG SRC="http://foobar.com/foobar.xbm">
]]>
To use a bitmap or image as an anchor, do something like this:
<![CDATA[
<A HREF="http://foobar.com/blagh.html">
<IMG SRC="http://foobar.com/foobaz.gif">
</A>
]]>
This causes the GIF image named foobar.gif to be used as an anchor to
the document named blagh.html. When a bitmap or an image serves as an
anchor, it is surrounded by a colored rectangle and made sensitive to
mouse clicks, just like ordinary text anchors.
Note that the value of a SRC argument is a Uniform
Resource Locator --- image data can thus lie anywhere on the
network; it is retrieved as the document is being formatted by Mosaic.
Once image data has been retrieved once, it is cached in memory, so
subsequent uses of the same image will be generally very quick.
For example, . Using this bitmap (which was also
used above) twice in the same document incurred very little additional
overhead.
Alignment
You can choose to have inlined images top aligned or bottom aligned
with their surrounding text. Here's a top aligned image: 
. The next paragraph will begin
with a bottom aligned image.
That was a bottom aligned
image. Whether an inlined image is top aligned or bottom aligned is
determined by the (optional) ALIGN attribute to the
IMG element: the choices are ALIGN=TOP and
ALIGN=BOTTOM (default is top). Here's how image of Dan
at the start of this paragraph was specified: <IMG
ALIGN=BOTTOM SRC="../Demo/quayle.xbm">.
Currently, text cannot be made to cleanly flow around an image. This
is a known drawback in HTML and
is due to be corrected in HTML's successor.
Another Demo
OK, now that you sat through that, here's another demo, this time with color GIF
images.
Extensive uses of inlined images can be found here, here,
here,
and elsewhere.
Acknowledgements
The GIF-reading code NCSA Mosaic uses was written by David Koblas; his
copyright statement is here.
