The development of the ability to incorporate pictures into screen displays may well have been the main factor in making the World Wide Web what is commonly described as the Internet’s ‘killer application’. While the production of computer graphic images can require specialised skills and equipment, much can be achieved with basic computer literacy and standard hardware. Some fundamental graphic art software operations are described, including conversion to the most common Internet graphics interchange format (GIF) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG or JPEG) file formats. Public domain sources of graphics, icons and clip-art are also noted. Hypertext mark-up language (HTML) features related to image display are discussed. Some more advanced uses of Web graphics include clickable image-maps, and animated images. An emerging portable network graphics (PNG) standard seems likely to replace some existing file formats, for both technical and legal reasons.
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