I think we can all see the motivation for this feature.
I don't think HTML needs to change to acomodate it, though.
Links were supposed to be multimedia links from very early on. The
<IMG SRC="xxx"> tag should have been <A href="xxx" rel="embed
present">.
PLEASE... everybody go back and read the thread between TimBL,
MarcA, et. al. when the <IMG> tag was first introduced...
I gave this summary on www-talk recently:
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 1995 21:17:41 +0100
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Embedding of Mime parts
In message <9501131604.AA04178@soleil.x.org>, Daniel Dardailler writes:
>
>Hello, I'm new to this group, and I'd like to know if work has already
>been done or is going on on this subject.
Interestingly enough, this thread dates back to 1993. I spent some
time trolling the archives to see what I missed during the year from
Feb '93 to Feb '94 when I had no net access. Some of it is _very_
interesting!
In response to MarcA's original proposal for an IMG tag[1], TimBL
wrote[2]:
|I had imagined that figues would be reprented as
|
|<a name=fig1 href="fghjkdfghj" REL="EMBED, PRESENT">Figure </a>
|
|where the relation ship values mean
|
| EMBED Embed this here when presenting it
| PRESENT Present this whenever the source document
| is presented
|
|Note that you can have various combinations of these, and if
|the browser doesn't support either one, it doesn't break.
|
|A see that using this as a method for selectable icons means nesting
|anchors. Hmmm. But I hadn't wanted a special tag.
MarcA gave his reasons for going with IMG in [3]. Basically, he wanted
to keep things simple.
But I wish I had a nickle for every time somebody came along later and
said "why isn't the <IMG> tag more general, like an <INCLUDE> tag or
something?" I'd be rich!
[...]
[1] Date: Thu, 25 Feb 93 21:09:02 -0800
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9302260509.AA24510@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Subject: proposed new tag: IMG
http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/.www-talk-1993q1.messages/174.html
[2] Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 14:04:55 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9302261304.AA05957@www3.cern.ch>
http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/.www-talk-1993q1.messages/178.html
[3] Date: Fri, 12 Mar 93 22:32:12 -0800
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9303130632.AA14200@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/.www-talk-1993q1.messages/249.html
[4] See http://www.x.org, though I can't find the ICCCM itself online.
[5] See http://www.x.org, though I can't find the ICE spec online.
[6] http://www.acl.lanl.gov/sunrise/DistComp/Objects/corba.html
[7] ftp://parcftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html
[8] http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1524.txt
[9] http://galaxy.einet.net/EINet/MacWeb/MacWebFeatures.html