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HTML5: Up and Running
book

HTML5: Up and Running

by Mark Pilgrim
August 2010
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
222 pages
7h 12m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from HTML5: Up and Running

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 ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449392154Errata Page