Embedded images in HTML

Here is a page which discusses how embedded images can be put into a webpage.

Many email programs, newsreaders, RSS feeds, and web browsers have the ability to "disable images". This feature exists for a variety of reasons. Perhaps you are on a slow connection and don't want to download the images. Maybe you are at work and don't want to accidentally download something against company policy. Or perhaps you don't want to load web/email bugs which spammers tend to use in their mailings.

I thought it interesting that even when you have images turned off in most of these systems, all that does is disable the parsing and subsequent rending of "img" tags. So theoretically even with that turned off, these embedded images get through.

Note that in the comments of that link above, there is an interesting discussion of the variety of different ways spammers are using techniques similar to this to get images through to you (it is hard for a Bayesian filter to parse text if it is in an image, so they like to send images to users in the spam - but many mail programs are now disabling image content via the "img" tags, so they have to find other ways around that).

Posted by Eric at April 12, 2005 09:08 AM | TrackBack