RIP WWW

It was a fun eight years, wasn't it?

Once in a while, a new idea comes along that just plain changes everything. The World-Wide Weeb, with its data-centric, platform-independent standards opened up a world of information sharing, content delivery and, through the awkward fumbling of Web Forms, client-server computing that officially qualifies it as the second real innovation of the computer era.

How did this revolution occur? With a quiet-little posting to www-talk.

Wind your clock back to 1993 and try to picture the world then. Novell was king, OS/2 was still semi-relevant, and the Internet was all about characters from the Archie comics. All of a sudden, some guy named Marc threw this one into the mix:

The Web Is Born

proposed new tag:IMG

by marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)

Date: Thu, 25 Feb 93 21:09:02-0800
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch

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

IMG

Required argument is SRC="url".

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag's occurrence.

An example is:

<IMG SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm">

(There is no closing tag; this is just a standalone tag.)

This tag can be embedded in an anchor like anything else; when that happens, it becomes an icon that's sensitive to activation just like a regular text anchor.

Browsers should be afforded flexibility as to which image formats they support. Xbm and Xpm are good ones to support, for example. If a browser cannot interpret a given format, it can do whatever it wants instead (X Mosaic will pop up a default bitmap as a placeholder).

This is required functionality for X Mosaic; we have this working, and we'll at least be using it internally. I'm certainly open to suggestions as to how this should be handled within HTML; if you have a better idea than what I'm presenting now, please let me know. I know this is hazy wrt image format, but I don't see an alternative than to just say ``let the browser do what it can'' and wait for the perfect solution to come along (MIME, someday, maybe).

Let me know what you think.........

Cheers,

Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu

The Web Dies

Apparently Andreessen's perfect solution did come along. We call it Microsoft.

On October 25, 2001, you could use your favourite non-Microsoft standards-compliant browser like Opera to pull up this steaming beauty from msn.com. (You'll have to type the URL yourself, because there's no way we're going to link to it.)

Attention: Web Browser Upgrade Required to View MSN.com

If you are seeing this page, we have detected that the browser that you are using will not render MSN.com correctly. Additionally, you'll see the most advanced functionality of MSN.com only with the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or MSN Explorer. If you wish to visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below.

©2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Too bad for open standards. Microsoft has since capitulated, but why would you think it could end any other way?

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