Since the start of this course, however, we have seen that there are various web design techniques which enhance the presentation of text: techniques like styles and, from the previous lecture, the use of tables for page layout. It is important to realise that these are basically peripheral to the main job of HTML. At the same time it is true to say that it's because of these presentation techniques that the WWW has achieved the popularity it has. This is particularly true of images. Were it a text-only medium, even bearing in mind the use of colours and layout, it is highly unlikely that the WWW would have taken off. And images, as we will see in this lecture, can be very useful for putting across information. Nevertheless it must be remembered that the handling of images is effectively additional to the main tasks of HTML; primarily, the handling of text and secondly, laying out the page. The problem with images is that because they are so visually prominent they are often considered to be more important to web pages than they actually are. And that means they can often be used very badly indeed. | 
