Proposed new tag: IMG [1993]

The interesting thing is the formats specified in Andreesen's request: Xbm and Xpm. This was a time before JPEG and GIF (and certainly before PNG).

I have some vague memories of the old days, when compressed images were a novelty, and people were talking about how you had to have special software to view GIF, which was described as this special ultra-high-tech format.

I think the main program people recommended was called GIFConverter, which itself is a telling name because it shows just how much of a new concept compression was that you somehow had to "convert" the image in order to display it. (edit: just checked, and not only is GIFConverter still maintained, but it's now available for iOS as well... didn't expect that)

In the next message is this gem:

> 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.

Marc Andreessen proposal was simple and his Mosaic with inline image support had been release first. Good. Otherwise it would be called ICON instead of IMG or be part of an overly complicated A-tag. It also explains the nuance between the HREF (A-tag) and SRC (IMG-tag) attributes.

It is fascinating to go through the thread history and read the names of the people commenting on the proposal: - Tim Berners-Lee - Guido van Rossum - Marc Andreessen

Wasn't there some rule to mark old content with the year it was published? So 1993 in this case.