Proposed new HTML tag: IMG (1993) (1997.webhistory.org)

"Good proposal though, and hope that this takes off." it was a proposal made 19 years back?

Personally, I'm skeptical.

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-f...

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!

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.

It's being worked on:

http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-proposals/raw-file/tip/responsive...

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?

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.

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.ht... And also look at the "Next Message". It's that Guido Van Rossum http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0184.ht...

He's endorsing Romney? Did not know that.

@pmarca, why? If you don't mind : ) Just curious.

Guido Van Rossum posts to the same group a few messages later.

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?

But how many more bytes would've been sent since 1993 were they image and source? :)

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.

TBL wanted to use the anchor tag for it: 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.

Do you also think <a href=...> should have been <anchor hypertextreference=...>?

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

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.

Thanks for the feedback -- I'll see if I can work that in before I release the first implementation!

Wow, I have been meaning to look what rel means for years and I always forget.

Am i glad I saw this.

A link to the exact section: http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html#history-of-the-img-eleme...

In the link provided by sbierwagen, it states:

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".

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.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.

Both <embed> and <bgsound> (the latter not standard, but certainly "proposed") have been around for a long time.

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"