That wild man Marc Andreessen…
“Out of nowhere, an idea came to him. What would it be like to use an image inside the text on a website?”
In 1993 he had to put that idea to somebody, and on one of the mailing lists that were popular at the time he proposed the “IMG tag”. The mail went roughly like this;
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 “>
This piece of code is unlike all the others. The reason; it came out of a mailing list on the spot. And of course, when he proposed it, plenty of people objected. That is a truth about the world, I suppose. The objectors’ main ground, as Marc Andreessen put it, was that the “heading, text and text” usage they had grown accustomed to until then was plain and workable. They also argued that text and images moving together would lengthen how long an article took to open and stretch out the loading time of pages.
Given the internet speeds of the day, they may have had a point. There was also the habit of it: images opened behind a link you could follow, and the user viewed that picture if they wanted to. If they did not want to, they could leave it.
Andreessen knew what he was doing and he had set his mind on something. Pages on websites should carry not only text but images. He is, after all, the founder of the Mosaic browser, which did a great deal for how the internet grew. He set off down a road and in the end he made the IMG tag a standard, in exactly the format he had proposed. Every webmaster knows the IMG tag; it is unlike every other tag out there.
In fact, in the summer of 1999 when I started building my first website, what struck me in the source was why the format of the img tag was not like the others. Every other tag has an opening, <turksem> for instance, and a closing, </turksem>. The IMG tag was different from all of them.
We have seen a lot of developments in the history of the internet. But; the story of IMG has always been the one that inspires me.
Marc is 52 now and he is still posting on Twitter telling people to go and do the thing they are thinking about.
Here is part of the manifesto he last published, in his own words.
We are being lied to.
We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.
We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.
We are told to be pessimistic.
The myth of Prometheus, in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator, haunts our nightmares.
We are told to denounce our birthright, our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.
We are told to be miserable about the future.
Truth
Our civilization was built on technology.
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.
For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this, until recently.
I am here to bring the good news.
We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.
Our writing on inspiring internet stories continues, so do not forget to follow Türk SEM.
