9 ms·

Proposed new HTML tag: IMG (1993)

• logotype 14y ago
  We've landed on the moon!
• richbradshaw 14y ago
  Yeah, that looks good, but it would be nice if it had a way to specify different resolution copies of the same image for the future when we have varying screen sizes and varying ppi. Good proposal though, and hope that this takes off.
  • ashishb4u 14y ago
    "Good proposal though, and hope that this takes off." it was a proposal made 19 years back?
    • lukeholder 14y ago
      woosh
    • jofo25 14y ago
      I can feel the breeze of it going over your head from my desk.
    • lewisflude 14y ago
      does not compute
  • pmarca 14y ago
    Personally, I'm skeptical.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  • cstuder 14y ago
    You know, there used to be a 'lowsrc' attribute for the image tag. (A lower resolution image, which would be downloaded and displayed before the download of the 'src'-image file.) It apparently is ignored by most browsers now and no longer allowed in HTML5. http://www.ssdtutorials.com/tutorials/title/html5-obsolete-features.html http://www.ssdtutorials.com/tutorials/title/html5-obsolete-f...
  • jcfrei 14y ago
    I got a bad feeling about this img tag - what if everyone just uses it to post pictures of cats and people making duck faces?! the internet might be flooded with useless content!
  • antihero 14y ago
    Could do it like HTML5 video, and use the figure tag. <figure> <img src=blah.png dpi=72/> <img src=blah_hq.jpg dpi=300/> <caption>The fabled Blah stalks it's prey.</caption> <copyright year=1997>John Doe</copyright> <license href="http://cc.org/sharealike">CC Sharealike</license> </figure> And then your browser could choose the DPI most like your screen.
  • pornel 14y ago
    It's being worked on: http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-proposals/raw-file/tip/responsive-images/responsive-images.html http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-proposals/raw-file/tip/responsive...
    • iand 14y ago
      You missed the flippant humour in the parent.
    • Evbn 14y ago
      Why does that is proposal have informal slangy cruft like "poly fill" and exclamation points? That is improper for a stabdard.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    Can't you just scale down to half-size an interlaced gif/jpeg and have the browser intelligently decide to stop downloading once it is at sufficient quality?
• Axsuul 14y ago
  No way! It's that Marc Andreessen. What great humble beginnings! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen
  • oceanic 14y ago
    This was the same year that NCSA Mosaic, the first ever web browser, was co-created by Marc Andreessen. He was probably working on Mosaic when he wrote this email.
    • mseebach2 14y ago
      Probably. If he wasn't, this bit from the first post becomes very weird: > This is required functionality for X Mosaic; we have this working, and we'll at least be using it internally.
    • vdm 14y ago
      > the first ever web browser Fact check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) > While often described as the first graphical web browser, Mosaic was preceded by WorldWideWeb and the lesser-known Erwise[5] and ViolaWWW.
  • whatusername 14y ago
    Click next in Thread. Then look at the "Next in Thread" - it's that Time Berners Lee http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0186.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0186.ht... And also look at the "Next Message". It's that Guido Van Rossum http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0184.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0184.ht...
  • sjm 14y ago
    He's endorsing Romney? Did not know that. @pmarca, why? If you don't mind : ) Just curious.
    • icebraining 14y ago
• Maarius 14y ago
  Sounds like a good idea
• eckyptang 14y ago
  I'm old enough to remember reading this reposted on usenet (or was it gopher) at the time. Cue discussion about how gopher was much better as it already did images. Little did we know back then...
  • pmarca 14y ago
    There was also serious backlash from certain people (cough TIM BERNERS LEE cough) that adding images to the web would degrade the user experience, encourage bad use cases, and encourage the riffraff to use it. Why yes, I still remember that, why do you ask?
    • oceanic 14y ago
      And here you were, an upstart kid, creating this newfangled "browser" so that anybody (anybody?!) could see the Web! The temerity of it! ;-)
    • nostrademons 14y ago
      But it did degrade the user experience, encourage bad use cases, and encourage the riffraff to use it. The easiest way to eliminate those problems is to not have users. Why'd you have to go making things popular? I could still be using Lynx on a 1200 baud modem!
      • pmarca 14y ago
        Tim, is that you?
        • nostrademons 14y ago
          See, if you hadn't let the riffraff in, you'd know for sure...
      • eckyptang 14y ago
        I'd rather be using Lynx on a 1200 baud modem. I was far more productive back then without the distractions of hacker news etc.
• ianstormtaylor 14y ago
  It's too bad they went with `img` and `src` instead of listening to Tony Johnson and using `image` and `source`. Saved a few characters for needless abbreviation.
  • felanthropop 14y ago
    TBL wanted to use the anchor tag for it: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0186.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0186.ht... "I had imagined that figues would be reprented as <a name=fig1 href="fghjkdfghj" REL="EMBED, PRESENT">Figure </a>" That would have really changed how things evolved. Probably then anything that was specifying an external resource would have all been anchors.
  • bbx 14y ago
    I'm actually glad they did. HTML is already very verbose. Although 'header' and 'footer' appear (supposedly) once per page, styling inline elements requires to use 'strong' or the generic 'span' tag. And it's one situation when the tag is numerously repeated, which ends up in a very low signal/noise ratio. My position may come from the fact that I type every line of code (I have no IDE, just Notepad++). But I think that there aren't enough HTML tags for us to have to use longer names in order to avoid confusion.
  • jacobr 14y ago
    But how many more bytes would've been sent since 1993 were they image and source? :)
  • raldi 14y ago
    Do you also think <a href=...> should have been <anchor hypertextreference=...>?
• 2bit 14y ago
  The reply was especially amusing: "I was proposing to use the file extension (.xbm above) to tag what format the image was in, but with the intention that in future, when HTTP2 comes along, the same format negotiation technique would be used to access images." Almost twenty years later and still no HTTP2! http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0183.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0183.ht...
  • mseebach2 14y ago
    Yes we do, it's just called HTTP 1.1 instead - and that exact functionality luckily made it in. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec12.html http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec12.html
• molmalo 14y ago
  Jim Davis: 1) why have SRC instead of HREF? Marc Andreessen: Because I wanted to avoid overloading HREF -- doesn't really make sense in this context, I don't think. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0196.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0196.ht... So... that's the reason!
  • pestaa 14y ago
    Well, you want to embed the image from a source identified by URL, not refer to it. In fact, I wonder why we need to use href when invoking stylesheets.
• billpg 14y ago
  Great idea Marc. Just wondering what should happen with images stored on different web servers should someone in the future ever come up with a way for servers to identify individual clients. Best sort something out now, before people get used to things working in a certain way.
  • pmarca 14y ago
    Thanks for the feedback -- I'll see if I can work that in before I release the first implementation!
    • rexreed 14y ago
      Was this the slippery slope that lead to the <blink> tag? (just to be fair, Microsoft introduced the equally horrendous <marquee>)
      • wanderr 14y ago
        It was a joke: http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag
• mcs 14y ago
  http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0186.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0186.ht... Ha, so that's what rel was supposed to mean.
  • steferson 14y ago
    Wow, I have been meaning to look what rel means for years and I always forget. Am i glad I saw this.
• sbierwagen 14y ago
  Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into HTML5 has a chapter about this very conversation, providing some usful context: http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html
  • roryokane 14y ago
    A link to the exact section: http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html#history-of-the-img-element http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html#history-of-the-img-eleme...
• Osiris 14y ago
  I was proposing to use the file extension (.xbm above) to tag what format the image was in, but with the intention that in future, when HTTP2 comes along, the same format negotiation technique would be used to access images. Nineteen years later and we still don't have HTTP2.
  • molmalo 14y ago
    In the link provided by sbierwagen, it states: http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html “HTTP2” is a reference to Basic HTTP as defined in 1992. At this point, in early 1993, it was still largely unimplemented. The draft known as “HTTP2” evolved and was eventually standardized as “HTTP 1.0” (albeit not for another three years). HTTP 1.0 did include request headers for content negotiation, a.k.a. “MIME, someday, maybe.” So, at least in this context, yes, we do have "HTTP2".
    • Lennie 14y ago
      Oops, I was calling HTTP/2.0 HTTP2 as a shorthand seems that I was so wrong to do that :-)
• gioele 14y ago
  I think the crux of that conversion is: «Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu) Fri, 26 Feb 93 13:32:09 -0800 Tim Berners-Lee writes: > I don't want to change HTML now if I can help it, until it has gone to RFC track I absolutely agree in all cases -- my purpose in suggesting IMG is that things are reaching the point where some browsers are going to be implementing this feature somehow, even if it's not standard, just because it's the logical next step, and it would be great to have consistency from the beginning -- so that when HTML2 comes along, we're all still in lockstep..... Cheers, Marc» http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0197.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0197.ht... The HTML 5 designers/implementers fight has always been there, with implementers usually having the last word. Mark Pilgrim on how much the WHATWG resembles the HTML 2 working group activity: http://web.archive.org/web/20110710091457/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-an-img-element http://web.archive.org/web/20110710091457/http://diveintomar...
  • seanalltogether 14y ago
    And because of this, people were already predicting what would end up happening as a result of implementers rushing out features http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0198.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0198.ht... Wait a minute -- let's temporarily forget about MIME, if it clouds the issue. My objection was to the discussion of "how are we going to support embedded images" rather than "how are we going to support embedded objections in various media". Otherwise, next week someone is going to suggest 'lets put in a new tag <AUD SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.snd">' for audio. There shouldn't be much cost in going with something that generalizes.
    • gioele 14y ago
      That thread also predicted the weird and unrealistic "let's-stay-inside-the-existing-boundaries" responses: > SGML does provide an official way of doing this folks and even if Dan C ain't here to round us up we maybe ought to stick to the track. > > <!ENTITY ICON6 SYSTEM "http://blah..>&ICON6 http://blah..>&ICON6; http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0202.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0202.ht...
• tlrobinson 14y ago
  "Otherwise, next week someone is going to suggest 'lets put in a new tag <AUD SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.snd">' for audio. There shouldn't be much cost in going with something that generalizes." http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0198.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0198.ht... Well, maybe not next week, but certainly 15+ years later.
  • icebraining 14y ago
    Both <embed> and <bgsound> (the latter not standard, but certainly "proposed") have been around for a long time.
• conradfr 14y ago
  I feel sorry for Tony Johnson that had "something very similar in Midas 2", as it's the Mosaic implementation that "won" :)
  • marquis 14y ago
    It also shows here in his comment how 'small' the internet was: maybe everyone having fibre to their home was some far-off imaginings of crazy people. "I somewhat prefer ICON since it implies that the IMAGE should be smallish"
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  Mark Pilgrim had an insightful take on the development of the IMG tag in his book Dive Into HTML5: http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html
• malandrew 14y ago
  I think the best part of this entire exchange is that it provides proof that shipping code wins.