Re: INCLUDE tag

Dan Connolly (connolly@w3.org)
Sat, 29 Apr 1995 01:50:49 +0500

Brian Behlendorf writes:
>
> Ha. This is really funny. For those who want some background on a
> couple interesting issues, check out the thread that begins at
> <URL:http://gummo.stanford.edu/hypermail/.www-talk-1993q1.messages/174.html>
> for a history of embedded entities in HTML.

Hrrmph. It was funny the first 257 times folks asked "why is there a
special <img> tag rather than a generalized <include> tag?" without
realizing that the <a> tag was intended to be a generalized include
tag, as in:

http://gummo.stanford.edu/hypermail/.www-talk-1993q1.messages/178.html
http://gummo.stanford.edu/hypermail/.www-talk-1993q1.messages/190.html

It was still a little humorous when the first 639 <audio> and <video>
tag proposals rolled in. (Again, <a> covers this.)

It's really not funny any more.

All this hypermedia-hype obscured the really powerful mechanism of
typed links. Hopefully, "the truth will out." But the support burden
is pretty significant at this point, and that tears away resources
from innovation.

Daniel W. Connolly "We believe in the interconnectedness of all things"
Research Technical Staff, MIT/W3C
<connolly@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/People/Connolly