i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

 In a blog post about the birth of the img tag in HTML, Mark Pilgrim reiterates the point made by Tim Bray about new languages and their evolution.  (emphasis mine) - 

HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.