Inline Graphics and Video
Graphics (including photos) and video that are embedded in a web page.
Inline graphics are displayed in a web browser as part of the document, and do not require a separate external viewer application to be seen. Likewise, inline video refers to a video clip embedded in a web page that runs in real time without requiring a separate player.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, inline graphics and particularly inline video were fairly rare, since they took up valuable space on a web server and made pages slow to load. That has all changes thanks to the sharp decline in storage costs and the wide-spread adoption of broadband Internet. Now most websites feature plenty of graphics and images, and embedding a video on your page takes little more effort than uploading it to your favorite web creator. What’s more, most website we frequent, particularly social media sites such as Facebook, allow users to post media to their homepage and easily share it with all of their connections.
Despite the widespread adoption of inline graphics and video, it is important to keep in mind that not all media files will work on your website or be easy for your visitors to view. When adding inline media, you should consider the following:
- What file-type does my website creator or social media platform support? For images, JPEG and PNG are very popular online formats. Bitmapped images and TIFFs may be too large to be supported, and even if they are, the large file size could result in unnecessarily slow download times for your visitors. For videos, MPEG-4 is a very popular online format.
- Can my server support this level of traffic? You should be fine with posting photos, but adding too many videos to your website may push your plan’s traffic limits, particularly if your videos become popular.
- Is there a better way to provide this content? There are plenty of sites on the Web that specialize in hosting photo galleries and videos. In many cases, you can embed links to these sites from within your webpage, so that the content displays on your page, but the file is stored and the streaming is managed by another service. YouTube is commonly used to share online videos.
- How much is too much? Adding a few photos to your blog post or a page of trip photos is fine, but embedding hundreds of inline photos could have your readers feeling like they’ve stumbled upon a Tumblr page instead of your website. Likewise, adding video to your page can be a great way to draw in new visitors. Adding ten videos and making them all auto-play is a guaranteed strategy to drive visitors away.