Diagrams, photographs, maps, and picture icons can help convey your message to international Web surfers who may not be fluent in English. You can even use pictures of text to overcome design limitations of Web publishing, specifically HTML codes. You can designate the hierarchical relationship between elements by designating which text string is a first-level headline and which paragraphs are body copy, but you can't specify typeface or point size. As the publisher, you can guarantee that a particular type style will appear on your Web pages only by generating a picture of the text and inserting it into your HTML documents as a graphic. All of the aforementioned uses require you to import pictures into your HTML documents as inline elements.
Inline graphics appear within the main browser window and are embedded in the text flow.
Pictures in a wide range of graphics file formats also can be stored externally on your Web server. There are both historical and technical differences between the .GIF and JPEG file formats. Before exploring the differences, however, you should consider the similarities of these two standards. They can represent a broad variety of image types, including drawings, pictures of text, paintings, and photographs. Both the .GIF and JPEG formats are cross-platform formats, which means that they can be viewed on PCs, Macs, or Unix systems.