Where did the img tag come from?
In the latest chapter of WaSP ASKS THE W3C, WaSP asks: How do we insert multimedia objects into Web documents in a backwards-compatible way? Buried in the article is a snippet on the history of the IMG tag, with a link to the original proposal by Marc Andreessen on the www-talk mailing list, posted in February of 1993.
In late 1999, I wrote an article for civic.com called “Make the Internet Accessible for All“ in which I wrote: “A Web site that can't be navigated without a mouse, or is useless without the graphics or doesn't have enough information in text format, will lock people out of your place of business. I read an e-mail message a couple of years ago written by a woman whose husband was blind. She spoke about how, in the early days of the Internet, it was a wonderful place for her husband. It was all text-based and universally accessible. Now, it's a world of images, clicks, online forms, marquees, blinking text and music, all of which can be obstacles to accessibility.“
By the time I “got on the Internet” (AOL actually) images were there - I never knew it any other way. Now I know how they came to be there.