You’ve probably also heard of the canvas element, a drawing surface with a rich set of JavaScript APIs that give you the power to create and manipulate images and animations on the fly. Next month’s article will cover both of these elements and their APIs in depth. You’ve probably heard of the new Audio and Video tags, both of which allow these types of content to function as first-class citizens in the browser, no plug-ins required. Now, with HTML5, media elements in the browser get a nice kick in the pants. Web authors have increasingly sought to use dynamic media such as audio, video, and interactive animations in their sites and applications and, until recently, the primary solution was a plug-in like Flash or Silverlight. Media, in general, is certainly more important than ever, and though the need for media on the Web has evolved over the past 18 years, the image has remained static.
You could even argue that, as we’ve moved from the Web of documents to the Web of applications, the IMG tag is more important than ever. Soon after, the IMG tag became the de facto standard for adding graphical resources to Web pages-a standard that’s still in use today. In 1993, Marc Andreessen, creator of the Mosaic browser, which would evolve into Netscape Navigator, proposed the IMG tag as a standard for embedding images inline with the text on a page.
In the early days online, when the Web was little more than a collection of static text and links, there was growing interest in supporting other types of content.