Ah, thank you. So it was a mistake to not initially honor the EXIF data, but it's so ingrained now that fixing it might 'break' existing images on the web. It'

Ah, thank you. So it was a mistake to not initially honor the EXIF data, but it's so ingrained now that fixing it might 'break' existing images on the web. It's a shame backward compatibility has to be so rigid. It's hard to imagine there being that many sites out there using manually rotated (or transform: rotated) images with EXIF data that would cause a double rotation. But at least I understand the rationale behind the tag now. Of course, the unfortunate irony is that with so little browser support, this CSS rule is likely to end up causing incompatibility between browsers anyway, at least for the next few years.