[bobince]

The Netscape of the 90s wasn't interested in making features ‘safe’. They were about throwing out features as quickly as possible to see what would stick.

The simplest possible syntax is to make named elements available globally, and if that clashes with future additions to the DOM API then well that's a problem for some future idiots to worry about.

as a strategy it worked pretty well, unfortunately

[WorldMaker]

As the article points out, this initiative was an 90s IE one and the Gecko team (Firefox, post-Netscape) were against it.