Inputting a default image in case the src attribute of an html <img> is not valid?

You asked for an HTML only solution...

 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<html lang="en">

<head>
  <title>Object Test</title>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>

<body>

  <p>
    <object data="http://stackoverflow.com/does-not-exist.png" type="image/png">
      <img src="https://cdn.sstatic.net/Img/unified/sprites.svg?v=e5e58ae7df45" alt="Stack Overflow logo and icons and such">
    </object>
  </p>

</body>

</html>

Since the first image doesn't exist, the fallback (the sprites used on this web site*) will display. And if you're using a really old browser that doesn't support object, it will ignore that tag and use the img tag. See caniuse website for compatibility. This element is widely supported by all browsers from IE6+.

* Unless the URL for the image changed (again), in which case you'll probably see the alt text.

This works well for me. Maybe you wanna use JQuery to hook the event.

 <img src="foo.jpg" onerror="if (this.src != 'error.jpg') this.src = 'error.jpg';">

Updated with jacquargs error guard

Updated: CSS only solution I recently saw Vitaly Friedman demo a great CSS solution I wasn't aware of. The idea is to apply the content property to the broken image. Normally :after or :before do not apply to images, but when they're broken, they're applied.

<img src="nothere.jpg">
<style>
img:before {
    content: ' ';
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    height: 50px;
    width: 50px;
    background-image: url(ishere.jpg);
}
</style>

Demo: https://jsfiddle.net/uz2gmh2k/2/

As the fiddle shows, the broken image itself is not removed, but this will probably solve the problem for most cases without any JS nor gobs of CSS. If you need to apply different images in different locations, simply differentiate with a class: .my-special-case img:before { ...

Inputting a default image in case the src attribute of an html <img> is not valid?

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