Fascinating bit of history from the early days of html, wherein Marc Andreessen proposes the use of a new tag to embed images in the text of a document.
Marc’s
<img>element didn’t mandate a common graphics format; it didn’t define how text flowed around it; it didn’t support text alternatives or fallback content for older browsers. And 16, almost 17 years later, we’re still struggling with content sniffing, and it’s still a source of crazy security vulnerabilities. And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway.The ones that win are the ones that ship.
(via kottke)