Inline linking

Inline linking (also known as hotlinking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs) is the use of a linked object, often an image, on one site by a web page belonging to a second site. One site is said to have an inline link to the other site where the object is located.

Inline linking and HTTP

The technology behind the World Wide Web, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), does not make any distinction of types of links—all links are functionally equal. Resources may be located on any server at any location.

When a web site is visited, the browser first downloads the textual content in the form of an HTML document. The downloaded HTML document may call for other HTML files, images, scripts and/or stylesheet files to be processed. These files may contain <img> tags which supply the URLs which allow images to display on the page. The HTML code generally does not specify a server, meaning that the web browser should use the same server as the parent code (<img src="picture.jpg" />). It also permits absolute URLs that refer to images hosted on other servers (<img src="http://www.example.com/picture.jpg" />).