This element reminds me of the ill-fated FIG element (https://www.cmrr.umn.edu/~strupp/elements.html#FIG https://www.cmrr.umn.edu/~strupp/elements.html#FIG) whi

This element reminds me of the ill-fated FIG element (https://www.cmrr.umn.edu/~strupp/elements.html#FIG https://www.cmrr.umn.edu/~strupp/elements.html#FIG) which was proposed in HTML 3.x, but never made it in. (I think it was replaced by EMBED which then transmogrified into OBJECT). FIG was intended to be an alternative to IMG, and unlike IMG it wasn't self-closing. It could have children, and the way it was supposed to work was that the outermost one the browser thought was "good enough" would get rendered. One possible usage at the time was to have a png in your outer FIG, a gif on the next one in (png was new at the time, so not well supported), then an IMG for browsers that didn't understand FIG. Once FIG was well supported then you'd leave out the IMG, and instead just have the "alt" text -- except it could have real markup instead of just the plain text of the alt attribute.