I think your paraphrasing is off just a bit. I didn't read that Berners-Lee was saying he thought it was a bad idea. I read it as that he didn't want to alter

I think your paraphrasing is off just a bit. I didn't read that Berners-Lee was saying he thought it was a bad idea. I read it as that he didn't want to alter HTML any more at that point until sometime later, i.e., "I don't want to change HTML now if I can help it, until it has gone to RFC track" Then Andressen's response wasn't that he was trying to force the issue, he was heavily suggesting it at that point so that maybe all future instances of the IMG tag worked the same when HTML2 began. He was pushing for consistency from the beginning, as he says, because essentially everyone was going their own version of IMG somehow anyway. Plus he was agreeing with the Berners-Lee statement I quoted above. As a final bonus, if I'm reading it right, Berners-Lee basically suggested image maps in the message that Andressen was responding his agreement with. If Berners-Lee was expanding on the idea of images in HTML then maybe he didn't necessarily see the suggested implementation as a bad idea.