I don’t think image, video, or audio support was a mistake. I think CSS and JavaScript and cookies and referers were. The web had rich text even before it had

I don’t think image, video, or audio support was a mistake. I think CSS and JavaScript and cookies and referers were. The web had rich text even before it had images, in the form of emphasis and strong emphasis, as well as a variety of other forms of semantic markup to indicate document structure and relationships. What I’m saying is that if a web page doesn’t work on NCSA Mosaic from 1994—modulo modern crypto and character sets—it is doing something very wrong. I don’t care that this represents a large proportion of the web today, that doesn’t make it any less wrong.