[SIGCIS-Members] First photo on the web?

[Thomas Haigh]

Hmm.

The article is a little vague on why this counts as a “photo on the web” other than the suggest that “Berners-Lee and his team cooked up a new edition of their still-primitive World Wide Web system, one that could support photo files.”

My recollection is that in-line display of images is conventionally credited to Mosaic version 2 as a first, earlier browsers having displayed merely a generic icon that would be clicked to open the image in an external window, displayed by a different app. I remember seeing them that way in an early xMosaic circa 1993, and Wikipedia agrees.

So if TBL and his buddies were experimenting with inline images in 1992 that requires a little tweak to the dominant  story of web history and a correction of the wikipedia page on Mosaic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) 

Also TBL’s own FAQ page states of Mosaic: “Marc and Eric did a number of very important things. They made a browser which was easy to install and use. They were the first one to get inline images working - to that point browsers had had varieties of fonts and colors, but pictures were displayed in separate windows. This made web pages much sexier.” http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser

If the image was just linked to from a web page, rather than displayed inline, then it’s hard to see what sets this image aside from any other graphical file on the Internet, and unlikely that TBL would wait until 1992 to link to an image when he had a functional browser by 1990.

I’m starting to wish that firsts and claimed anniversaries were not so popular with journalists, or that they would at least check with Wikipedia first. It's still a nice bit of history though.

Tom

From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On Behalf Of William McMillan
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2012 9:39 AM
To: sigcis
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] First photo on the web?

http://tinyurl.com/6qxku3c