What Is an Animated Image? - XHTML 1.0 Tutorials - Understanding Inline Images and Image Maps

An animated image is a special image file saved in animated GIF format. When an animated image is displayed in a browser window, multiple image frames will be displayed in sequence to form a simple animation.

Here is a tutorial example with a server-side image map:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Animated GIF Image</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <h4>Animated GIF Image</h4>
  <p style="background-color: #eeeeee; padding: 8px;">
   Are you getting lots of emails these days?
   <img src="/lots_of_email.gif"" alt="Lots of email"/>
   I am.</p>
 </body>
</html>

If you save the above document as animated_image.html, download this animated GIF image file and view it with Internet Explorer, you will see an animated image embedded inline in a text paragraph as shown below: