Poignant shit

By SCdF | Published: November 4, 2009

Why do we have an image element?

But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include>; element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins.

It’s a hugely important point that seems to be rather lost among peer coding and reviews and architecture diagrams and forward-thinking generic frameworks that could some day save us a world of hurt because we might maybe sort of kinda do this maybe thing that might maybe be a problem later… but certainly isn’t now.

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3 Comments

  1. nb
    Posted November 4, 2009 at 11:28 pm | Permalink

    Halfway there. I think the saying is “[we believe in] rough consensus and running code.”

    Because the Internet is a cooperative network – and if you don’t cooperate, we don’t network with you.

  2. Cams
    Posted November 5, 2009 at 11:32 pm | Permalink

    we don’t network with you. Unless you have the monopoly.

    Great article you linked to btw.

  3. nb
    Posted November 6, 2009 at 2:33 am | Permalink
    Unless you have the monopoly.

    Fairly sure nobody’s cornered the market on RFCs yet…