Widely ? - likely not. Not many were doing web design when I was starting.
One had to be on the inside of very high tech science to have access to
the early version of browser. We were writing how to files as there were
not any paperbacks or documents to be found.

Our internal network was in swing while the outside was in Bulletin boards.

Martin

Dave Balderstone wrote:
In article , Martin
H. Eastburn wrote:

I was doing web designs on Sun 3 and Sun 4 boxes a long long time ago.
Internally before the WorldWideWeb was shortened to WWW and other names.

Mosaic was the first 'Netscape' long before the other browsers and companies.

Tiff was one of the primary formats a number of others - now mostly obscure.

The web for me started in 1987 when I downloaded (via our FTP server)
from CERN the install files for Mosaic. Two of us were tasked to get a
division up and going. I did practical pages and collected graphics.

I still have and use TIFF / TIF format - my camera generates TIF and JPG
at the same time. And Jpg only.


TIFF was invented in the '80s by Aldus as a format for "desktop
publishing", aimed at scanner vendors as a standard format. The first
version of the TIFF spec was published in a1986, and was binary only.
In 1988 rev 5 added support of palette colors and LZW compression

As the market for that was primarily the Macintosh in those days, I
find it unlikely that TIFF was being used in any serious way in the
early days of the web, and it certainly was not used for what we were
doing on the web in 1994 and forward. I'd welcome any citations you can
provide that demonstrate TIFF being widely used as a display format in
web browsers, well, ever.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_Image_File_Format for details
on the TIFF specification.