aerotom
dragosr30 years ago today, we started putting images on the web. Marc Andreessen proposed adding the IMG tag to HTML.
aburka š«£@dragosr So the dynamic of "standard" as "I have implemented this in my browser and now the rest of you must too or you'll be behind" started right at the beginning
RenƩe@aburka in the early days of consensus internet a working implementation went a lot further than a proposal that would get bikeshedded to death on Usenet, tho.
Proud as I am to have been blocked by MA on Twitter ages ago for politely calling bullshit on some fuckery or other, this isn't the worst way to go about presenting an idea for negotiating a change to a standard. "Let's try it, and if it works, share with others" isn't a bad approach.
Jeff Smith@reneestephen @aburka @dragosr Rough consensus and running code. āRough consensusā loosely defined
šøš¹2ck š±š@reneestephen
isn't it still the way things are done? yeah, you need to make a spec and propose it, but if you come with working code that just cuts down on so much variation from underspecified parts of the system to have a reference implementation
@aburka @dragosr
isn't it still the way things are done? yeah, you need to make a spec and propose it, but if you come with working code that just cuts down on so much variation from underspecified parts of the system to have a reference implementation
@aburka @dragosr
Sƶren@reneestephen @aburka @dragosr that may have been true then, but today, the dynamic is
1) (browser vendor) implements feature
2) browser vendor also offers spec
3) it gets accepted as a draft
4) web devs start using it
5) other browser vendors have comments on the spec; itās still a draft
6) web devs ignore them, complain that other browsers donāt implement the feature the exact way vendor 1 did
Itāsā¦ not great. Maybe the days of prefixing were better after all.
Andrew Diederich@dragosr I remember about three years later when grad students started asking for SLIP/PPP accounts so they could get images dialed in. I thought "Well, I guess if you think you need it..."
Brad@dragosr thanks, I uh, didn't actually need to know I'm older than pictures on the internet :/
I'm soooooooo old
I'm soooooooo old
Jae Bloom@reassuringurl @dragosr Same! š¤£
Dale Hagglund@dragosr Between that and the BLINK tag, it's been downhill ever since. (Dammit, where in hell is the old-man-in-a-rocking-chair emoji when I want it.)
Yann AĆÆtBachir@dragosr I feel old
xmlns="Dan"@dragosr and it's been downhill ever since.
il_teo@dragosr I was 15. Darn I feel old š¤£
ŠŠµŠ½ŠøŃ šŗš¦@dragosr the missed opportunity to make the alt= property required...
John Wilson@dragosr
Happy that the usage of āfoobarā lives on
Happy that the usage of āfoobarā lives on
Larry Garfield@dragosr Related: The first image on the web was from CERN's all-girl science rock band: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-cernettes/
Their one album is actually pretty great.
July 18, 1992: The First Photo Uploaded to the Web, of CERNās All-Girl Science Rock Band
In 1990, shortly before a CERN physicist subverted gender and science stereotypes by adapting Alice in Wonderland as an allegory in quantum mechanics, a different type of delightful subversion was ā¦
Phil Stevens 
@dragosr Back in the days when Marc was making decent suggestions.
Before <blink>, that is.
pedro š@dragosr nxoc01.cern.ch 
Bread80@dragosr Iām old enough to remember when you could add height and width tags so the page didnāt keep jumping around while elements downloaded.
Curtiss Grymala (he/him/his)@dragosr @chris To think; "XBM" and "XPM" formats were the ones that they thought made the most sense to support initially. I've been involved with computers and the web for 30+ years, and I don't recall ever using those formats for anything. TIFF? sure. BMP? absolutely. GIF? Obviously. I even remember how revolutionary it was when I discovered JPG on a BBS. XBM/XPM? Not at all.
calcifer š§Æ@cgrymala @dragosr @chris itās a while ago, so I may misremember, but I think this was because xpm and xbm were among the very few image formats without patent encumberments. A lot of software used those formats internally, so itās not surprising that you didnāt interact with them as files, though.
Most of the image formats you know now are more popular now because of combinations of patents expiring and more permissive licenses (read and display not having a royalty, for example)
Renoir Boulanger
ticho@dragosr ...and today, in 21st century, increasing number of websites are unable (unwilling?) to display those images without browsers enabling #Javascript. Oh my, how we have regressed.
Matt@dragosr it'll never catch-on
Suji Yan@dragosr old history
Julien Deswaef
FirefighterGeek 
@dragosr "..MIME someday, maybe" -- aaaagghhhh..
I've spent MONTHS working on code that takes mime format child entity references and round trips them with browser viable html references and back.
Lee Ryman@dragosr and we still can't reliably reload an img with the same URL, no-cache be damned.
WraitheYou Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
Bertrand Marne@dragosr
It is very interesting to read all the discussion about the IMG syntax and to see, in the end, how the current one have been chosen.
http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html
maddie (MOVED!) 
@dragosr so, this is the guy to blame for modern web design /j