image not displaying when runat="server" is set

Question

i have an image as such:

<img src="../pics/img.gif" runat="server" id="imgID" alt="Close" />

the image is not displayed unless i removed the runat="server".
is there any reason for this behavior?

Answer 1

It must be calling Control.ResolveClientUrl and ending up with the wrong path. If you look at the HTML source you'll probably figure out what's going wrong.

Try

<img src="~/pics/img.gif" runat="server" id="imgID" alt="Close" />

to set the path relative to the project root.

Answer 2

try

<asp:image ImageUrl="~/pics/img.gif" runat="server" ID="imgID" AlternateText="Close" />