30 years ago; Marc Andreessen proposed the <img> HTML tag | Hacker News Reader

30 years ago; Marc Andreessen proposed the <img> HTML tag

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69 pointsyuvalsteuer21 comments

Wish I was starting my career in tech 30 years ago when new ideas were this easy to come up with.

30 years ago the internet was a joke and it was not obvious to most it would be big. Feel free to suggest ideas in pockets of crypto, robotics, and biology. Even very obvious things we have in web tech are not in these areas.

In seven months, it will be the 30th anniversary of the Eternal September.

It wasn’t a joke - the value of networks was long proven, and computer prices and capabilities were improving rapidly so mainstream ownership was becoming common.

The big question was how much it’d cost: at that point in the United States at least you had companies like AOL or CompuServe which had been commercially viable for a decade or more but almost everything charged you back the minute and the phone company stranglehold kept speeds low even if you did spend a lot.

What made the internet and especially the early web interesting was that it had so much for free: you still needed a computer, modem, and ISP but once you had that you could do a ton of things without asking a monopolist for permission or paying Danegeld for the privilege of starting a business which made their business more profitable.

I would say that the internet is a joke today. 30 years ago it was serious.

"A Long Digression Into How Standards are Made"[1] from "Dive into HTML5" talks about this: http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html#history-of-the-img-eleme...

I didn't have Internet in '93. Can anyone here elaborate on how images were done prior to this?

They weren’t. The web was text based. If you wanted images you went to an alt.binaries.pictures newsgroup in your newsgroup app and uudecoded the attachments.

People fucking HATED Marc Andreesen for making the world wide web like magazines.

The mindset at HTML creation revolved around representation of things like scientific articles, whitepapers, manuals, textbooks.

Why images are considered bad? Their absence seems really hurts expressiveness of at least some articles.

Images were “bad” because browsers were all text based at the time. Adding images meant having to create a “graphical“ web browser ( wasteful in the minds of some at the time ) and meant not being able to read all web pages with full fidelity with your text based browser of choice ( every single web user at the time ).

This was back in the days when people were using their terminal program in Windows to Telnet into the UNIX server at school / work to browse the web ( in text ) after all.

People using the World Wide Web were probably using things like Veronica and Gopher just as much.

Also, if you are connecting over a modem, images would slow things down.

I do not remember too much resistance though. Mosaic was a revolution ( literally ).

Even basic HTML had several levels of headers, which were supposed to be shown differently - at least fonts, if not sizes. NeXT, which was used as the first web server, had graphical capabilities. Frankly, I'm not really sure there was significant push against images at all. Even with 2400 bps modems - some of the slowest at the time - images could be loaded, surely qualitatively slower than now, but still could.

1993 is a bit before my tech awakening. But I can tell you that even in 1996, 56kbps was considered fast and 33.6kbps was more common.

I dunno how slow things were in '93, but slower for sure.

A 2MB image, and remember that JPEG and PNG weren't common yet either, would take you 10 minutes to download on 33.6 kbps.

That's 2000000 bytes, 10bits per byte (start bit + 8 bits of data + stop bit), 33kbits/sec

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That's 10 minutes of waiting for the download, doing nothing else.

(Asked in a mistrustful, tribalist fashion) 56K X2 or K56 Flex?

I was on 33.6k until 2000s, when I finally moved to broadband!!

Price Club (now Costco) was pushing some internet service that wasn't AOL, but was a lot cheaper.

1993 was right around when 14.4K was becoming popular. I had a 9600 baud modem, which still felt fast (compared to my previous 2400.)

My first Internet connection was over a 9600 baud SLIP connection.

But at least we had the LOWSRC attribute, so you had an idea of what you were waiting for, and could go somewhere else. Should never have been deprecated IMO.

It's interesting to note Marc talks about the future sizes of hypermedia in this other 1993 thread on the HTTP2 spec: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0002.ht...

Mosaic came out in 1993: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

This was the first browser to add graphics and forms. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this software launched the modern web.

Marc Andreesen created Mosaic. He went on to co-found Netscape which released Navigator at the end of 1994 and had the largest IPO in history. After that it was the “Cool Site of the Day” and the race was on…

For consumers, it was BBS's where you had to download them first or Compuserve-like services with their own apps and capabilities. IIRC GIF was born from one of the proprietary services. AOL introduced me to the wider Internet--and its graphics and markup--not long after '93. Then stand alone ISPs grew in popularity.

This turned out to be a useful change.

Like farming, I think the jury is still out.

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