Someday, maybe

Mark Pilgrim reminds us that less than seventeen years ago, the web's forefathers were trying to figure out how to incorporate images into HTML. He carefully extracts from and annotates the relevant threads, explaining acronyms that even I don't remember.

This proposal was never implemented, although the idea of text-if-an-image-is-missing is an important accessibility technique which was missing from Marc [Andreesen]’s initial proposal. Many years later, this feature was bolted on as the attribute, which Netscape promptly broke by erroneously treating it as a tooltip.

(Via kottke.org.)