"[N]one of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins."

http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html

I think a large number of these problems came about because instead of issuing an RFC for proposed solutions, they just did it. You had a number of renegade developers focused on shipping instead of developing consensus.

Given the scale of the project at the time, which had a very small user base, maybe this was a reasonable approach. It's just that as the project grew in scope, the process never seemed to change until it became what is the W3C in all of its absurdist glory.

The IETF seems intimately familiar with the technical problems they are solving, but the W3C seems oblivious to even the most superficial implications of their decisions. I honestly doubt that even one person on the W3C committee has designed a modern, high-exposure web site.

The entire thread, starting with your first link, is really great. Tim Berners-Lee even suggests 2 alternatives for the IMG tag. Thanks for that.

The alternatives are not much better (overloading a tags is more elegant and would probably have eliminated the later mess of needing embed tags and plugins for additional types of media).

Even now we have img, audio, video, etc. instead of say a single well-behaved and extensive media tag that could also be used to include content from another page.

I wonder if this was a concession to the limited browser code and slow networks at the time. With the img tag you know its going to be a jpg, gif, or png. If it was a media tag then you have no idea what it is. Imagine downloading a 10mb quicktime file or flash object on dial-up so the mime header can be read as you wait for the page to render. Its only recently that anyone has bothered to handle video in the browser.

Could web servers back then just send the client the header of a file? I think these guys were working with a lot of ugly limitations that we've only recently overcome. Andreeson recently said that he expected the back and forward buttons to be temporary but no one thought of a good replacement for them. We still haven't.

I can't really tell if Marc Andreessen were being sarcastic in response to the thread going off towards complexity-land or serious when he wrote this:

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0209.ht...

> Actually, maybe we should think about a general-purpose procedural graphics language within which we can embed arbitrary hyperlinks attached to icons, images, or text, or anything. Has anyone else seen Intermedia's capabilities wrt this? It's one of their most impressive capabilities, actually.

>

>Something like a cross between PostScript and CGM might work... actually, maybe we should just use one or the other, and add the extensions we need for the links. Also we'd want to make sure that it's completely editable.

I think your paraphrasing is off just a bit.

I didn't read that Berners-Lee was saying he thought it was a bad idea. I read it as that he didn't want to alter HTML any more at that point until sometime later, i.e., "I don't want to change HTML now if I can help it, until it has gone to RFC track"

Then Andressen's response wasn't that he was trying to force the issue, he was heavily suggesting it at that point so that maybe all future instances of the IMG tag worked the same when HTML2 began. He was pushing for consistency from the beginning, as he says, because essentially everyone was going their own version of IMG somehow anyway. Plus he was agreeing with the Berners-Lee statement I quoted above.

As a final bonus, if I'm reading it right, Berners-Lee basically suggested image maps in the message that Andressen was responding his agreement with. If Berners-Lee was expanding on the idea of images in HTML then maybe he didn't necessarily see the suggested implementation as a bad idea.

Another fun part is the quote:

Again the intention would be that when HTTP2 comes along

Twenty years later and we've still not got it.

He actually said HTML2, but I think, given that we are at revision 5 going on 6 of HTML with the addition of CSS and Ecmascript, while we have held pretty steadfast at HTTP 1.1, when talking about the web, HTTP got more right out of the chute than HTML did.

If Kay really was talking about the presentation layer of the web, this seems like a reasonable argument for it.

He was discussing HTTP2, in terms of format negotation, whatever that ended up being:

but with the intention that in future, when HTTP2 comes along, the same format negotiation technique would be used to access images.

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0183.ht...

Fascinating, thanks for posting the links.