Considering that is for all intents and purposes their default behavior, that sounds most curious and nonsensical indeed.

Were you having the problem that images align to font baseline and not line-height? Aka why vertical-align:bottom became commonplace?

I mean inline-block worked in FF as of 2003 and Mozilla suite before that for quite a ways, and legacy IE treats all inlines as inline-block anyways.

So I'm kind of hard pressed to even think what your problem might have been. That's not a thing/concern/issue. Dimes to dollars your problem had jack-all to do with “inline-block’ and everything to do with either vertical-align or some other positioning and sizing issue.

NOT that it matters in this case since they're being set to block, not inline-block. Thus not only are you talking about what would/should be a non-issue even back then if you understood CSS, I don’t understand its relevance either.