Going from the usefully useless spacer to the false start of HTML 3.0. HTML 3.0 never made it to a final specification, but it contained many interesting if half-baked ideas. One of these was the fig element. Like spacer the element had many attributes now obsoleted by CSS.

Also like spacer or the logo and photo types in vCard, but unlike img, object, or canvas elements fig tells what kind of image is shown, here a figure. In addition the figure had associated content, the caption and credit elements, as well as content fallback like for object in HTML4. caption reappears in XHTML2, while credit has yet to reappear.

Two other properties were unique for this version of HTML, the overlay, an image positioned on top of the figure, handy for sprite animations, but here ostensibly to save bandwidth. The images could have a checksum so that when leeching an image the owner of the site would not be able to swap the image with an inappropriate one without the browser detecting that the image had been tampered with.