A Really Very Long Digression into How Standards are Made in HTML5

Some junk text to read.  Why do we have an <img> element? That’s not a question you hear every day. Obviously someone must have created it. These things don’t just appear out of nowhere. Every element, every attribute, every feature of HTML that you’ve ever used — someone created them, decided how they should work, and wrote it all down. These people are not gods, nor are they flawless. They’re just people. Smart people, to be sure. But just people.

One of the great things about standards that are developed “out in the open” is that you can go back in time and answer these kinds of questions. Discussions occur on mailing lists, which are usually archived and publicly searchable. So I decided to do a bit of “email archaeology” to try to answer the question, “Why do we have an <img> element?” I had to go back to before there was an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). I went back to the earliest days of the web, when you could count the number of web servers with both hands and maybe a couple of toes.


“Mosaic” was one of the earliest web browsers. (“X Mosaic” was the version that ran on Unix systems.) When he wrote this message in early 1993, Marc Andreessen had not yet founded the company that made him famous, Mosaic Communications Corporation, nor had he started work on that company’s flagship product, “Mosaic Netscape.” (You may know them better by their later names, “Netscape Corporation” and “Netscape Navigator.”)

“MIME, someday, maybe” is a reference to content negotiation, a feature of HTTP where a client (like a web browser) tells the server (like a web server) what types of resources it supports (like image/jpeg) so the server can return something in the client’s preferred format. The Original HTTP as defined in 1991 (the only version that was implemented in February 1993) did not have a way for clients to tell servers what kinds of images they supported, thus the design dilemma that Marc faced.

I have something very similar in Midas 2.0 (in use here at SLAC, and due for public release any week now), except that all the names are different, and it has an extra argument NAME="name". It has almost exactly the same functionality as your proposed IMG tag.