Mark Parnell said:
Regardless of that, the best way to achieve what you are really looking
for[1] _would_ be in pure HTML:
<img src="img01.jpg" alt="Something appropriate"><br>
<a href="page40.html">Previous</a> | <a href="page02.html">Next</a>
(As a rule, an image should have a caption, but I skip that issue here,
since it's on a different dimension. I just point out that without any
caption, even "Picture 1", the "Next" link could be taken as a caption by
some naive or creative person - and there are hundreds of millions of
both kind of people on Earth.)
But is the "Previous" link really useful? It just makes is a bit more
difficult to get to "Next" when tabbing (and gives you an opportunity to
misclick, too). Adding a link to the top or start of the collection,
after the next link, would be conceivable, if not necessary.
You could enhance the possibilities of convenient browsing through the
images using some extra attributes, some of which (especially the onload
attribute and the accesskey attribute) are somewhat debatable:
<body onload="document.getElementById('next').focus()">
<img src="img01.jpg" alt="Something appropriate"><br>
<a href="page02.html"
id="next"
rel="next"
title="Picture 2"
accesskey="n"
That way, most users would be able to follow the link just by hitting
Enter (though they might not realize this unless you tell them that
on the front page, and this is somewhat awkward since you really cannot
know in which browsing situations the user can just hit Enter - but the
"focus rectangle" could make this obvious enough to IE users).
