Neil's News

Image to HTML

22 May 2003

MS Publisher's answer to the age-old problem of HTML conversion is to take a screen-capture of the document, save it as a GIF and publish it. The resulting websites look like this.

While this is the extreme case of using images where HTML should be used, the use of images in place of HTML is ever increasing. To counter this trend, I've created the extreme case in the opposite direction. This tool converts any JPEG or PNG image into HTML. [Update: now works with GIFs] Try it out!

The image to HTML converter isn't meant for serious use (though it works flawlessly). It was built to prove a point: images and HTML are completely interchangable on the web. There is absolutely nothing that one can do that the other can't. Web designers need to be more flexible in determining whether something should be rendered as an image or whether it should be drawn with HTML. A well ballanced mix of the two will result in websites which are easier to update, faster to download and more visually appealing. It just takes a bit more work.

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