This was an awesome read. Thanks!
Laurie
on Why do we have an IMG element? 
As we cross the event horizon of real deflation, most of you folks would be well advised to learn a trade of some kind. Unless you’re working at the accelerator.If we are, indeed, facing such an economic calamity, I can assure you the high energy physics ("the accelerator") will be the first thing on the chopping block. In such an eventuality, what "most of you folks" have to fear is a flood of very smart ex-physicists seeking IT jobs. Full disclosure: I'm a high energy physicist, for whom this stuff is, indeed, a "hobby project".
The real lesson here is this: HTML and HTTP were hobby projects for geniuses working at particle accelerators. Full time, salaried positions for thinking about inane alt text features of pictures on the web is a secondary, or even tertiary effect of a global asset bubble that is in (initial) process of popping. As we cross the event horizon of real deflation, most of you folks would be well advised to learn a trade of some kind. Unless you're working at the accelerator.
Graybeard
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Man, I loved reading this. Thank you!
John Walker
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Oh man, MacPPP, those were the days, Zipping into The Dorsai Embassy in Long Island City, getting excited over that hot new 14.4k modem to replace the ol' 2400 bad boy... Nostalgia!
"Some of the operating systems from 1993 still exist, but none of them are relevant to the modern web." ... "In 1993, [...] Linux was distributed via Usenet". Slackware 1.0 was released in 1993, and distributed over FTP. (I'm sure it was also distributed over USENET, because everything was distributed over USENET, and still is.) The path from 1993 Linux to 2009 Linux is at least as direct as the path from 1993 HTML to 2009 HTML.
Slacker
on Why do we have an IMG element?
I agree with your sentiments - getting it done is sometimes more important than getting it "right".
Oh wow this post has brought up so many memories! I can barely remember MacSLIP; I remember MacPPP being krotchety; and I remember FreePPP (and it's monkey) being an awesome replacement eventually.
@anonymous> "The company Andreessen co-founded was called Mosaic and the new browser he wrote was called Netscape. But before they shipped, NCSA blocked them from using that company name," IIRC, MCC shipped Netscape late summer 2004 with the Mosaic Communications Corp company name, but only became Netscape with the 1.1N version (which used the Netscape logo/throbber icon from a competition). I wish I could purge this useless crap from my brain and remember useful things instead.
RichB
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Sometimes crap things that deserve to die get lucky. HTML is one of those things.
Mike
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Insightful article documenting some of the early discussions around HTML. Many thanks for taking the time to put this together!!
Jon Jackson
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Opera 10 still supports XBM.
Shmuel
on Why do we have an IMG element?
The latest Webkit nightly running on SnowLeopard supports XBM.
drew
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Woohoo! Always fun to see mentions of Intermedia. I was the principal engineer who implemented the structured graphics component of Intermedia that included graphical anchors and hypertext links. I believe the key innovation of HTTP and HTML was a more-or-less open spec that gave anyone the ability to set up their own servers. In many ways HTML is the ultimate example of the "worse is better" principle. Anyways, Intermedia shipped, but it was bound up in a lan-based networking model, and using A/UX made it really hard to distribute widely.
"Real artists ship." --Steve Jobs
OK, I think I've fixed all of the Mosaic/Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox lineage bits. Sorry for the confusion.
Just want to say thank you for a great article!
Chris L
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Nice article, but a few corrections: Andreessen's browser was just called "Mosaic", or officially "NCSA Mosaic" since it was developed at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. "X Mosaic" just refers the X-Windows implementation; there were also Mac Mosaic and Windows Mosaic. The company Andreessen co-founded was called Mosaic and the new browser he wrote was called Netscape. But before they shipped, NCSA blocked them from using that company name, so they renamed the company Netscape and disambiguated the browser by calling it Netscape Navigator. Firefox doesn't directly descend from Netscape Navigator. The whole point of the Mozilla project that resulted in Firefox was to throw out the awful Navigator source code and rewrite everything.
Anonymous
on Why do we have an IMG element?
23, hardly any gray hears at all, and already used MacPPP ;-) Great post nevertheless, and to be honest, I feel almost flattered to be called a "graybeard".
Stephan
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Random comment: Gecko no longer supports XBM, I'm not sure whether Safari does, and Chrome has a bug on file for removing that support soon.
Peter Kasting
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Great post, Mark, Re: James Pearce's comment:
All those malformed snippets wake me wince in a post-XML world. I suppose at the time, element and attribute casing & quoting were fairly arbitrary.Not so much arbitrary, but "up to the individual"--because well-formed SGML allows for that--more flexibility / variety in the markup than XML. Compared with XML, with SGML, there was more concern that markup should be able to adapt to individual content and authoring idiosyncrasies. And, pre-web, there wasn't much hindsight about what happens when tens of thousands of people are authoring in the same few markup syntaxes and expecting compatible output from many general purpose parsers / reader-apps. XML has more of an idea about markup conformity, e.g., to make for a simpler DOM that's easier to parse and work with.
Z.T.: I believe "shipping code wins" was meant to be a conclusion based on empirically observed facts. I don't think Mark was advocating shipping whatever the hell you want, standards be damned.
Karl von L.
on Why do we have an IMG element?
I'm 25 and I think I'm at the cutoff of the youngest people who remember trumpet winsock. Anyway, I'm concerned your notion of "shipping code wins" is an endorsement to Microsoft's policy of doing whatever the heck they want and standardizing it later by killing the competition, or taking over the standards body. A standard without a good reference implementation loses. Not shipping the code loses. But shipping alone is insufficient.
Z.T.
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Great post. Thanks.
That was a great trip back in time. Now can you explain why we have DIV tags? I'd like to eventually kill them off -> http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/death-to-the-div/
I hate content sniffing with an unending passion (and not just on the web, mind you; file(1) and magic(4) are the spawn of Satan). The idea that one can rely on figuring out the type/format of a file by examination of the byte stream is one of the worst mistakes ever made in the history of computing, in my opinion (it's unclear whether that or file typing extension is actually the worst). For me, IE actually deserves those vulnerabilities.
Pierre Lebeaupin
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Great read. Your writing continues to draw me in: Dive Into Mark/Python/HTML5 and your WHATWG posts are deliciously packed with information and links. Cheers.
Fantastic history! (now on reddit homepage).
Can I call you Gandalf and buid a shrine? Thanks a lot for such writing such excellent posts.
NCSA X Mosaic and Netscape are unrelated browsers. Many people also make the same mistake about Spyglass Mosaic and NCSA Mosaic - including Wikipedia: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg "Yes, we licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA (at the University of Illinois), but we never used any of the code." - Eric Sink, Spyglass Mosaic project lead.
RichB
on Why do we have an IMG element?
All those malformed snippets wake me wince in a post-XML world. I suppose at the time, element and attribute casing & quoting were fairly arbitrary. Tag-soup (aka street HTML) seems to have been very acceptable in these discussions, rather than just the later consequence of tolerant browser parsing.
X Mosaic (also known as NSCA Mosaic) where not renamed to Netscape Navigator. While Marc Andreessen where involved in both, and they had a similar name at one point, NSCA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator is usually considered two different browsers.
Interesting post. Loved the conversation about the formats. Kinda applies to the HTML5 video/audio tag discussions, doesn't it?
I know my Google-fu may not be very good, but I was unable to find support for XPM in any browser that I had heard of. As for XBM, support was removed from Firefox 3.next on the 29th of July, and you apparently need a registry edit to enable it in IE, although I was unable to get that to work.
So, you are saying that if Microsoft ships support for InfoPath processing instructions and proprietary elements in IE we'll have them all over pretty soon?
Also under 30, and just had a flash of nostalgia about the sheer feeling of triumph when MacPPP would successfully connect my old Performa (through my Global Village TelePort!) to Earthlink (having weaned my family off AOL.) Connecting to Wi-Fi just isn't the same.
Very nice post. It's fun to think about a world in which the cement we take for granted now is as pliable as our current ideas.
It's the Stanford linear accelerator, not the "Standard" linear accelerator...
To me standards work has always had an air of self-importance that it didn't deserve, but after reading this, I feel more of the fun game of trying things and seeing what sticks.
love this. i hope i can contribute well to the future.
Great article. It's great to take a look back and see how far we have come, though that include tag would of been handy.
Greybeard!? I'm under 30 and I remember (not fondly, I assure you) fighting with both Trumpet Winsock *and* MacPPP!
A/UX is a Unix.
rshxd
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Great post, definitely interesting to read, considering I remember 'craving' Netscape Navigator to start learning about the web and HTML - this was when I was 10 or 11, and I remember Netscape Navigator being bundled with a book that taught you web design - wow how times have changed!
Shipping doesn't mean you win, but not shipping means you lose.
Steve
on Why do we have an IMG element?
Awesome post. Thanks for the interesting history.
Andy
on Why do we have an IMG element?
I'd always had hope for SMIL catching on someday. Alas.
Xbm and Xpm were popular graphics formats on Unix systems. They are still supported in modern browsers. (I tested in Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome.)
IE8 is not a modern browser.
Who are you calling a graybeard? As it happens, I now live right around the corner from the old MacSLIP office, where I picked up my copy mumblemumble years ago.
Terrific post. I particularly like the reminder that HTML is not utopian. There is no YEAR ZERO for HTML. It's a conversation:
HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.