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Images are an important part of web pages nowadays. There is hardly a website which does not contain at least one image. Images describe the idea and the concept in an easy way and more beautifully. They are used to enhance the user interactivity with the web page. Good images arrest the attention of the user and boost his interest in the website. Images can be used to say something, to make the website creative, to attract the user etc. One of the important ways the images can be used in a website is in the form of hyperlinks. Images can be linked to hyperlinks, they are used as hyperlinks and they can be used as the download links so that the user can download them via internet. When we use an image as a hyperlink, it redirects us to a new location, or a new web page or to another image. To use an image as hyperlink, first of all we have to insert an image in our HTML document by using the <img alt=”" /> tag. We can set the border, height, width and other attributes of the image as required. Once the image code is written, just add <a> tag before it and at the end of the code put </a>. This will transform the image into the hyperlink. For example:

<A HREF=”URL”><IMG SRC=”d:\my folder\image1.jpg” WIDTH=”300” HEIGHT=”100” BORDER=”10” ALT=”This is the main page”></A>

The URL specified after the HREF attribute will tell the hyperlinked image where to redirect the user when he clicks on it. This URL can be a path to a .html document or it can be the name of an image file also.

For example:

<A HREF=”image2.html”><IMG SRC=”image1.html”></A>

Or

<A HREF=”http://www.yahoo.com”><IMG SRC=”image2.html”></A>

We can also make a hyperlink to point to an image. It means that when the user will click on the hyperlink it will be shown the image associated with that hyperlink. The code for this can be written as:

<a href=”http://www.contentmantra.com/image1.jpg”>Click here to display image</a>

Whenever the user will click on the ‘Click here to display image’ text, he will be shown image1.jpg located at http://www.contentmantra.com. After the image is displayed, you can right click and save it to your computer’s local hard drive. You can also use the target attribute of anchor tag to tell the web browser where to open the new image. The most commonly used predefined values of target are _blank, _self, _parent, and _top. Each of them will open up the image or the document associated with the hyperlink at different locations. The details of all the four values are as follows:

1) _blank: This will open the linked image/document in a new browser window with no name.
2) _self: This will replace the current html page to show the linked image/document. If the original document which has hyperlink on it is in a frame or frameset, then the _self will open up the linked image/document within that frame.
3) _parent: It will replace the html page it came from.
4) _top: This will load the linked image/document in the current browser by replacing anything within the browser.

The use of the targets is not mandatory. They are optional attributes which may or may not be used with <A> tag.