Mosaic Renders the GIF Inline

APR 15 1993 · 12:00

The NCSA Mosaic logo, itself a GIF, from the browser that put inline images into the document and built the visual grammar of the early web. Place: NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Figures: Marc Andreessen, 21, lead developer · Eric Bina, principal engineer · the NCSA software development group Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser at CERN displays images in separate windows. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, working on Mosaic at NCSA, decide images should appear inside the document, alongside the text, autoplaying their animations the moment the page renders. They implement the IMG tag with this behavior in Mosaic 1.0, shipped April 1993, free for Unix, Mac, and Windows. The format of choice is the GIF (see [[compuserve-ships-gif87a-1987]]). JPEG is too new and photographic; XBM is monochrome and ugly; PCX and BMP do not compress for the modem-speed web. The GIF's 256-color palette, LZW compression, and small headers make it the only image format a 1993 web server can serve at scale and a 1993 browser can render before the user gives up. Video: An NCSA-era walkthrough of Mosaic sent to the US Copyright Office around 1994. Inline images, click-and-load.