IMG Tag Origin

NCSA Mosaic was one of the first cross-platform browsers on the market. We met him with great reverence. In just a few months after the release in the summer of 1993, Mosaic changed the view not only about browsers, but also about WWW as a whole. Gary Wolfe wrote in Wired that Mosaic "made a strong impression not of information, but of a person."

Mosaic has made the web more suited for hundreds of thousands of people going online for the first time. Of course, Mosaic was easy to install on any OS. It was extremely easy to use. But the IMG tag probably played a big role in these changes.
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Of course, several months before its release, no one knew how popular the browser would be. Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The development was led by stubborn Mike Andreissen , who was still a student at that time, together with NCSA employee Eric Bean. Andreissen has been interested in the web since he first met him two years before.

When developing the first version of Mosaic, he and Bean had a lot of ideas. They believed that the future of the network depends on more complete graphics support. At that time, users could only access pictures through links. If there was a picture on the page, the user clicked on the link, and it opened in a new window. Andreessen and Bina represented how the browser can display images directly in the text of web documents. No extra clicks.

At that time, there were only 18 HTML elements. None of them fit the task of Andriessen. Therefore, in February 1993, Andreyssen posted a new topic on the www-talk mailing list, popular with network developers. In it, he casually proposed a new HTML element:

I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

Img

Required argument is src = ”url”.

Some may find such a statement unceremonious. But this is how the web advanced. After all, the web project is open, isn't it? Although standards are developed at the W3C, in theory proposals are accepted from everyone.

But the new tag for images met with resistance. Some were worried that the arbitrary addition of tags at some point would resemble a dam break, and as a result each type of media will have its own tag - like aud for audio (or even a tag for video? This will be too much!)

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the WWW, also doubted. He suggested using the <a> tag instead, rather than introducing a completely new tag. This would allow users to decide how to process images. He believed that the web should be highly customizable, and represented a world in which users tinker with their browsers so that they display the pages as they like. And the strict IMG tag did not fit into this picture.

Tony Johnson, the sole creator of the rival Midas browser, objected somewhat differently. Why do you need to use the img abbreviation if you can use an image with the same efficiency? He also made a request for a textual alternative to images - an early version of what later became the alt attribute.

But the story is not over. It turned out that the letter from Andreessen was not so much a proposal as an announcement. Bina and Andreessen have already decided to include the IMG tag in the release, and were not going to change the syntax and support. Images embedded in the page were the highest priority for their browser, and nothing could affect it.

When Mosaic was released in 1993, and users with designers could begin experimenting with images, the IMG tag quickly gained popularity. The people and the media accepted him.

Standards of HTML in the end, too, pulled up. The IMG tag was included in the HTML 2.0 specification released by the W3C in 1995. Different alternatives were proposed, for example, the FIG tag, which had its own alt attribute, useful for users who do not see the image. But by then IMG won.

Its implementation was already difficult to change. Although the new standard added ALT to IMG, Mosaic (renamed Netscape by then) continued to support IMG as a purely visual element. In early implementations, the ALT attribute was even duplicated in the form of a pop-up message that appeared when you hover over the image. As a result, the developers wrote calls like "Click me!" Instead of using it to describe what is on the image. After adding the TITLE attribute to images, they become more accessible.

So, if you ever wondered why we use IMG and SRC instead of IMAGE and SOURCE - blame the perseverance of Mosaic programmers. That's how we got the IMG tag, abbreviations and everything else. Andreessen was the first in the market, and it is very difficult to argue with success. Soon it became a tradition for browsers and standards. At first, browsers were introduced, and then standards were tightened. During the "browser wars" this led to serious consequences, and since then this situation occurs periodically. But this tradition continues to this day. And all because of the modest IMG tag.