You dont necessarily have to have a seperate PHP page/script serve up the image, you could base64 encode the stream and embed it into your markup as you asked. Assuming you have a variable, for example $imagestream that equals the image field from your table row access routine, you could do this:

 . ')';
?>

This works well for reasonably small to medium images, but be aware of two things: The page load time is increased as the image data is encoded in the HTML (actually bloated). Be sure your mime type is correct for the image. :)

Just to clarify aswell: = is an assignment operator. == is the comparison operator as mentioned above. === is another comparison operator I call identity, which checks for equality AND type. As PHP is not strongly typed, a variable can change types dynamically at runtime. Example:

$a = 2;
$b = "2";

A comparison would be like this:

if($a == $b)
{
// Do something.
}

..would be TRUE, as they have the same value, but one is an integer and one is a string.

if($a === $b)
{
// This wont happen.
}

.. would be FALSE, because they have matching values but different types! For me, understanding this in the beginning helped me to write reliable condition tests for websites and applications.