It's historical... coincidence? You can recommend him reading part about Past of diveintohtml5.info, where there are some interesting stories, actually mail correspondences, between web developers. Web developers means they were, in fact, developing the Web we see nowadays ;)
I.e. <img> tag we are used to:
<IMG SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm">
could be:
<ICON name="NoEntry" href="http://note/foo/bar/NoEntry.xbm">
or
<A HREF="..." INCLUDE>See photo</A>
or
<INCLUDE HREF="...">
but finally devs decided to stick with <img>, which was already implemented:
We’re not prepared to support INCLUDE/EMBED at this point. … So we’re
probably going to go with (not ICON, since not all
inlined images can be meaningfully called icons). For the time being,
inlined images won’t be explicitly content-type’d; down the road, we
plan to support that (along with the general adaptation of MIME).
Actually, the image reading routines we’re currently using figure out
the image format on the fly, so the filename extension won’t even be
significant.
I don't know direct answer to your question, but I'm pretty curious about <link> tag, too. Finding answer would probably include some web archives digging.
与恶龙缠斗过久,自身亦成为恶龙；凝视深渊过久,深渊将回以凝视…
