The Web As Collage

Collage of protocols

Collage of machines

Collage of participation / interests

TO DO: Situate the below messages in the early development of the web. Identify the key players (Berners-Lee, Andreesen), where they are and what their various interests are in the web.

The History of the IMG (and EMBED tags)
- Mark Andreessen's email proposal of the tag. Note the discussion of formats (xbm). Interesting to cf discussion of propriety open formats such as JPEG and the more controversial "GIF" and eventual development of PNG as an open alternative.
- http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0186.html

Linking & Embedding

If you follow the archived discussion thread of the proposed image tag, you see things proposed such as an special "include" attribute on the anchor tag to mean to embed, or place that which is referenced in-line in the flow of the referring page. This behavior was not followed however as the anchor tag (<a>) has remained purely a mechanism to introduce click-able links (ie references that the user must click -- or explicitly request following in some fashion), in order to open.

It is interesting to parallel the discussion around tags to those around HTML 5's addition of <audio> and <video> tags. (need references)

Exercise: collage