Chapter 3. Images and Animations

In the early days of the Web, one of the first effects done with JavaScript was image manipulation. A classical example was hover images: Hover the mouse pointer over an image and its appearance changes.

Netscape introduced JavaScript access for images in browser version 3. At that time, Internet Explorer 3 for Windows was in beta, so it was too late for this capability. However, Internet Explorer 3 for Macintosh was released after the Windows version, giving the Microsoft engineers enough time to add JavaScript image access to IE Mac. Beginning with IE 4, the Microsoft browser can access images as well, as do all other relevant browsers.

This allows not only nice graphical effects but also more sophisticated applications such as image slide shows.