The alternatives are not much better (overloading a tags is more elegant and would probably have eliminated the later mess of needing embed tags and plugins for additional types of media).
Even now we have img, audio, video, etc. instead of say a single well-behaved and extensive media tag that could also be used to include content from another page.
I wonder if this was a concession to the limited browser code and slow networks at the time. With the img tag you know its going to be a jpg, gif, or png. If it was a media tag then you have no idea what it is. Imagine downloading a 10mb quicktime file or flash object on dial-up so the mime header can be read as you wait for the page to render. Its only recently that anyone has bothered to handle video in the browser.
Could web servers back then just send the client the header of a file? I think these guys were working with a lot of ugly limitations that we've only recently overcome. Andreeson recently said that he expected the back and forward buttons to be temporary but no one thought of a good replacement for them. We still haven't.
> Actually, maybe we should think about a general-purpose procedural
graphics language within which we can embed arbitrary hyperlinks
attached to icons, images, or text, or anything. Has anyone else seen
Intermedia's capabilities wrt this? It's one of their most impressive
capabilities, actually.
>
>Something like a cross between PostScript and CGM might work...
actually, maybe we should just use one or the other, and add the
extensions we need for the links. Also we'd want to make sure that
it's completely editable.
