A Long Digression into How Standards Are Made
Why do we have an <img> element? I don’t suppose that’s a
question you ask yourself very often. 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 <img>
element question. 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 on the fingers of both hands, and maybe a couple of
toes.
On February 25, 1993, Marc Andreessen wrote:[1]
I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:
IMG
Required argument is
SRC="url".This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag’s occurrence.
An example is:
<IMG SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm">(There is no closing tag; this is just a standalone tag.)
This tag can ...