The thread is fascinating. What I love about it is how the discussion quickly became a variety of proposals for other generalized--and more complicated-- constructs. Lots of discussion on making a generic Mime-based embedded object for example. The worst was "<!ENTITY ICON6 SYSTEM "<a href="http://blah..">&ICON6;"" rel="nofollow">http://blah..">&ICON6;"</a> Then Marc just ignored the comments, put the <img> tag into Mosaic and it became canon. Would HTML have been so easy for the masses if it was horribly generalized? I'd argue the simplicity of tags like <b>, <img>, <a> made it so popular.
Did this go far enough? Imagine if we'd had a gallery element instead:<p><gallery type="slideshow" autoscroll="true">
<img src="one.jpg" />
<img src="two.jpg" />
</gallery><p>If we'd left that sort of functionality up to the browser imagine the bandwidth saved on tbales for image galleries, javascript carousels, slideshows, etc. Not to mention having more control over elements like autoscroll behavior. Browsers seem to have added just enough functionality for web developers to abuse the document format into an application layer but not enough functionality for a good one.<p>Also, the first reply to that message (<a href="http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0183.html" rel="nofollow">http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0183.ht...</a>) sounds like the creation of the favicon.
It's fun to read through this history, while I'm listening to "Where Wizards Stay Up Late".<p>In reading through the thread [1], I noticed Marc and Jim Davis used an example audio file from the NSA that no longer exists: <a href="http://nsa.gov/pub/sounds/gorby.au" rel="nofollow">http://nsa.gov/pub/sounds/gorby.au</a><p>Anyone know what the story behind that was? Was that a common example?<p>[1] <a href="http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0196.html" rel="nofollow">http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0196.ht...</a>
It's interesting that the example in the proposal uses the file: protocol rather than http. Was that a mistake? Today a browser would handle such a tag by looking for a local file, rather than "attempt[ing] to pull over the network."
Crazy to see Guido van Rossum comment too:<p><a href="http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0259.html" rel="nofollow">http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0259.ht...</a>