You used to wrap everything in
tag before the ![]()
img src tag itself.
Vertical alignment was where things got messy. You had three choices for how text sat relative to the graphic.
Vertical Alignment Options
The default behavior? Image on the left. Text on the right. If you wanted that flipped, you had to use the
trick again. But for the text-to-image relationship itself, you picked one of these three values:
- align=”bottom” : Text lines up with the bottom edge of the image.
- align=”top” : Text lines up with the top edge.
- align=”middle” : Text sits alongside the vertical center of the image.
Each example looked like this:
It was ugly code. But it worked.
Creating Animated GIFs
Static images are boring. You wanted movement. Flash. Life.
The tool for that era was The GIF Construction Set. You didn’t code animation. You built it. You created individual frames. Sequenced them. Then rolled them up into a single .gif file.
One image. Many frames. No video player required.
That was the trick. You could make a spinning logo or a bouncing headline without a browser plugin. Just a single image file that the browser interpreted as motion.
It wasn’t elegant. The files were huge. The colors were limited to 256. But it worked.
We don’t do this anymore. CSS animations replaced it. JavaScript took over the heavy lifting. But if you’re maintaining legacy code from the late 90s, you still need to know how align="middle" actually affects line height. And why your animated GIF is taking three seconds to load on 3G.
The old tags are gone. The logic remains.
