When is HTML not HTML?

So i was looking at a folder on my disk and i was quite suprised to see the following:

            

Two html files with different icons.  I thought maybe i had a
extensions turned off and these were actually epl-v10.html.wordhtml or
something weird like that.  So i took a look at at the files at
the command prompt and i saw this:

            

so that eliminated that idea.

So i start hunting around inside the file and after bit of playing
around i discovered that the adding and removing the following lines
would change the icon that was displayed:

    <meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document>

<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 9">

<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 9">

Very interesting.  I always thought that icon selection was
independent of the contents in the file, but now i guess that that's
not the case.  Neat!

So does this mean i can see picture thumbnails when i'm in "Icon" mode and not "Thumbnail" view?