Some suggestions are horrible, but some of the suggestions are pretty good and forward thinking. Allowing img elements to have fallback content would have have

Some suggestions are horrible, but some of the suggestions are pretty good and forward thinking. Allowing img elements to have fallback content would have have the introduction of new image formats (jpg, png, svg) much more painless. We later got the alt-attribute for fallback text, but just using the content for fallback would be both simpler and more powerful. It is probably a case of worse-is-better. They chose the simplest possible solution and shipped. Introducing the img tag is what made Mosaic dominant. Later Netscape went to far with worse-is-better. Remember they introduced the <SPACER> tag to allow designers to control whitespace, at a time when Internet Explorer already had shipped with support for CSS padding and margins. Worse-is-better only works when you ship features before the competition, it does not mean worse features will win out over better features.