[HN Gopher] Cool HTML elements nobody uses
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Cool HTML elements nobody uses
        
       Author : nateb2022
       Score  : 210 points
       Date   : 2022-10-03 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tapajyoti-bose.medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tapajyoti-bose.medium.com)
        
       | eimrine wrote:
       | <marquee>
        
         | dagurp wrote:
         | This and <blink> were so overused that browsers started to show
         | them without any animation
        
           | dunham wrote:
           | Decades ago, I disabled blink by loading my netscape binary
           | into emacs and changing the tag name. Surprisingly marquee is
           | still there, you can even go into the DOM and rename your top
           | level elements "marquee" and the entire page scrolls.
        
             | sli wrote:
             | Just did that to HN's <center>. Got a good chuckle out of
             | it, thanks.
        
               | theandrewbailey wrote:
               | I did that (via browser inspector), then wanted to upvote
               | you. It was very hard. Eventually got it!
        
           | yamtaddle wrote:
           | A couple years ago I went looking for JS marquee replacements
           | and zero of them I could find would deliver the same
           | functionality as <marquee>
           | 
           | Functionality's gone, it seems. Evidently it's hard to
           | replicate all of it because none of the options I could find
           | managed it.
        
             | stonogo wrote:
             | You don't need javascript to replace marquee tags. There
             | are a plethora of implementations using CSS animation.
        
               | yamtaddle wrote:
               | If you just want stuff to scroll, sure, but it's got a
               | lot of features:
               | 
               | https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
               | US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ma...
               | 
               | I just know that when I went to try to make a marquee
               | using some of these features a couple years ago, I
               | couldn't find _anything_ pre-made that could do what I
               | wanted, which was nothing more than what  <marquee> could
               | do, so it was going to be a lot of custom work. Which
               | surprised me, I expected someone to have perfectly re-
               | created the whole tag just for giggles if nothing else.
               | There were _tons_ of partial solutions, but nothing that
               | was a complete replacement.
        
       | moralestapia wrote:
       | _sup_ and _sub_ are quite common, I think.
       | 
       |  _map_ and _area_ was how I was taught to write websites like 20
       | years ago (whew!).
       | 
       | Thanks a lot for _meter_ and _progress_ , though! I didn't knew
       | about those, they will def. save me a lot of time in the future
       | (I always end up implemented my own progres bar and it's a PITA).
        
       | silvestrov wrote:
       | <sup> and <sub> has the problem that they change the line height.
       | So if you have an paragraph and one line contains "Nice ground
       | with 42 m2 grass" then that line is taller than all the other
       | lines, which makes it rather ugly.
       | 
       | So I automatically converts all m<sup>2</sup> and similar into
       | the unicode symbols:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
        
         | derefr wrote:
         | > So I automatically converts all m<sup>2</sup> and similar
         | into the unicode symbols
         | 
         | Nice in theory, but only works for trivial cases. Most old-
         | school use of <sup> is as a quick-and-dirty pre-MathML way of
         | rendering equations as (accessible) text in browsers. (The
         | people who didn't care about accessibility rendered TeX to an
         | image and embedded it.)
        
         | WorldMaker wrote:
         | Though it useful to point out that the Unicode superscripts and
         | subscripts were also originally intended to be
         | ascenders/descenders (which in the strictest sense would also
         | affect line height) are as represented in most fonts instead as
         | roughly "numerator/denominator" numbers instead of "proper"
         | superscripts and subscripts.
         | 
         | The W3C recommends to prefer the markup versions, and various
         | years the Unicode committee has also suggested not to use the
         | Unicode versions except in backwards compatibility with old ISO
         | codes and in certain semantically more meaningful situations as
         | "single words" (chemistry formulas more so than math, for
         | instance). Though the Unicode recommendations have waffled back
         | and forth over the years. Both have recommended it in part
         | because of metadata available to screen-readers for
         | accessibility.
         | 
         | Not that you always have to follow such recommendations from
         | groups such as these, just that it is useful to know what the
         | recommendations are. Also as others pointed out, some CSS
         | stylesheets are better than others at line-height of sub/sup
         | markup and while the default styles are kind of awful, it is
         | useful to know there are CSS options.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
        
         | flanbiscuit wrote:
         | > <sup> and <sub> has the problem that they change the line
         | height. So if you have an paragraph and one line contains "Nice
         | ground with 42 m2 grass" then that line is taller than all the
         | other lines, which makes it rather ugly.
         | 
         | normalize.css fixed this problem by setting the line-height to
         | 0 and using position relative.
         | 
         | https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/blob/master/normali...
        
       | sbf501 wrote:
       | MAP and AREA have been around since the 90's, but METER/PROGRESS?
       | I never noticed those sneak into HTML. I've been using Bootstrap
       | for ages. Cool.
       | 
       | SUP and SUB I find don't work very well with glyphs, but work
       | fine with standard Latin characters.
        
       | nayuki wrote:
       | My favorite obscure useful HTML elements: <var>, <wbr>, <time>,
       | <dl>/<dt>/<dd>, <thead>/<tbody>/<tfoot>/<th>.
        
         | parminya wrote:
         | I don't think tbody is really obscure to anyone writing with
         | DOM. You can't embed a tr into a table: it has to be in a
         | thead/tbody/tfoot. If you're writing HTML it's fine, the
         | browser does it for you. But if you're writing DOM (directly or
         | indirectly with e.g. React) you need to use the tbody tag or
         | else it won't do you what you wanted.
        
       | ironmagma wrote:
       | I spent hours and hours playing with <MARQUEE />, had lots of fun
       | putting a marquee within a marquee. Sad that there's no mention
       | of it.
        
       | francisofascii wrote:
       | You can add these to your list of esoteric tech questions to ask
       | during interviews. /s
        
       | math0ne wrote:
       | Abbreviations seems actually useful!
        
       | spdustin wrote:
       | My favorite (non-conforming, do-not-use) element is <xmp>. It
       | switches the browser's parsing context to "generic raw text"; it
       | emits any "child" markup as-is, without parsing it.
       | 
       | [0] https://jsfiddle.net/spdustin/y4m3qd71/1/
        
         | derefr wrote:
         | I believe you can also just write <![CDATA[whatever]]>. (See
         | https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3302648/should-i-use-
         | cda...). It's normally only used to wrap non-HTML content
         | inside <style> and <script>; but you could put "HTML that
         | should be rendered as text" in there as well!
        
           | missblit wrote:
           | Note that CData can _only_ be used what HTML calls foreign
           | content.
           | 
           | So `<math><![CDATA[x<y]]></math>` will print x<7, but
           | `<p><![CDATA[x<y]]></p>` will emit a `cdata-in-html-content`
           | parse error (your compliant HTML parser is allowed to give up
           | here if it's lazy) and is parsed as
           | `<p><!--[CDATA[x<y]]--></p>` (your HTML parser will actually
           | do this because giving up leads to poor user experience when
           | no one else does)
        
         | missblit wrote:
         | <plaintext> is also fun. Unlike <xmp> you can't get out of it
         | with a closing tag.
         | 
         | Aside: plaintext is one reason browser DOM is a superset of
         | HTML. By which I mean you can add <plaintext> to the middle of
         | your DOM through JavaScript and everything is hunky-dory, but
         | it's impossible to serialize the DOM to HTML so it'll HTML-
         | parse back to the same DOM (at least if the serializer doesn't
         | produce any JavaScript).
        
       | fowlie wrote:
       | <marquee>remember this tag?</marquee>
        
         | solarkraft wrote:
         | <center><blink>hello!</blink></center>
        
       | donatj wrote:
       | I am old enough to remember development when image maps were
       | still common for things like headers and big hero homepage
       | navigation images.
       | 
       | I'd like to add <input type="image" src="..."> which acts like an
       | img tag and submit button that submits the clicked X and Y
       | essentially as two separate inputs
       | 
       | Here's an MDN example showing X and Y position in GET string on
       | click.
       | 
       | - https://mdn.github.io/learning-area/html/forms/image-type-ex...
        
         | psyklic wrote:
         | The original Space Jam website had some great image maps, e.g.
         | 
         | https://www.spacejam.com/1996/cmp/souvenirs/souvenirsframes....
        
         | sebazzz wrote:
         | Trip down memory lane: Internet Explorer didn't quite interpret
         | the standard correctly and sent the coordinates as floating
         | point numbers. If you had this input[type=image] on a ASP.NET
         | WebForms page, this then caused ASP.NET WebForms to crash, as
         | it tried to interpret the postback arguments of the X/Y
         | coordinates as integers. I think this was later fixed by
         | patching Internet Explorer.
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | Trip down memory lane: Internet Explorer didn't quite
           | interpret the standard correctly. Full stop. Anything said
           | after this is just using words for vanity ;-)
        
             | yakshaving_jgt wrote:
             | This was a fun one: https://jezenthomas.com/you-think-css-
             | in-js-is-bad/
        
         | dopidopHN wrote:
         | I think using image map to make several area links from the
         | same image was my first actual production of code.
         | 
         | Half of it was outputted by dreamweaver 3.0 but it needed a lot
         | of manual touch up.
        
         | inasmuch wrote:
         | Image maps unlocked expression on the web for me when I was a
         | kid. I enjoyed coding websites, but felt creatively limited by
         | what I knew to be possible with simple HTML and CSS. When I
         | realized I could turn any graphics I made into live web
         | elements without having to fit adjacent pieces into a layout I
         | could simulate with tables, I felt I could finally make a
         | website that reflected my artistic self.
         | 
         | I think I published the last version of my personal website
         | that I made with an image map in 2004 or so. I've been trying
         | to think of a good use for one over the last couple years but
         | haven't come up with anything yet.
         | 
         | The last really cool image map-based website I remember was
         | Margot's Room by Emily Carroll [1]. Dunno if she coded it, but
         | it's her comic.
         | 
         | [1] http://emcarroll.com/comics/margot/index.html
        
           | stefs wrote:
           | i remember slicing images into rectangles which could be fit
           | into a table. stole some portrait photograph of a woman,
           | maxed out contrast, color reduction + dithering, then drew
           | the eyes shut and make the open/close frames into gifs with
           | different timings. the result: an image of a women who
           | blinked both eyes independently, without the use of css and
           | js.
           | 
           | the outcome wasn't planned, it just happened - but it was so
           | funny i still have to laugh all those years later.
        
         | cantSpellSober wrote:
         | They still are, check out amazon dot com
        
         | flkiwi wrote:
         | I laughed (affectionately) when I saw image maps. That was a
         | real 1997 moment.
        
       | poiuyytrewq wrote:
       | "7 Cool HTML Elements Nobody Uses"
       | 
       | => "7 Cool HTML Elements [the author] Never Uses"
        
         | commandlinefan wrote:
         | Actually most of these are things that people used to use in
         | the 90's, but stopped using because they didn't give you as
         | much control as you needed.
        
       | croes wrote:
       | sub doesn't seem to work in Android Chrome
        
       | mNovak wrote:
       | There's a certain irony to me that this discussion of cool html
       | elements is all embedded as images
        
       | bawolff wrote:
       | The one im sad never caught on was (the now removed from spec)
       | <keygen>
       | 
       | Basically let your users generate rsa keys so you could use
       | mutual tls (i.e. client side certificates) instead of passwords.
        
       | somat wrote:
       | I have this unhealthy aversion to javascript. so when I make a
       | web application it is in a very late 90's style. For my latest
       | thing, I needed to select points on an image and did I do the
       | sane thing and write two lines of javascript and be done with it,
       | of course not, I went with server side image maps. in 2022. sigh,
       | no, I don't know what is wrong with me either.
       | 
       | https://www.w3schools.com/Tags/att_img_ismap.asp
        
       | AlbinoDaffy wrote:
       | Oh hey I know the 4th one! I use <details> and <summary> all the
       | time for gitlab tag comments and releases!
        
       | exabrial wrote:
       | `<blink>` tag!
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | nashashmi wrote:
       | + Marquee
       | 
       | for image divs that websites keep using JS for.
        
         | nashashmi wrote:
         | https://codepen.io/hanihsdd/pen/KKaQxdX
        
       | koala_man wrote:
       | I didn't know about datalist, but now I'll start using it. I've
       | been annoyed at the multitude of completion implementations that
       | all behave slightly differently.
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | i think the problem with datalist is the default styles, and
         | the lack of customizability (eg if you want multiple slections,
         | or to display descriptions or images next to each choice, or
         | you want fuzzy matching). most of the time you'll just want to
         | go ahead and import a ComboBox component someone else has made
        
           | timw4mail wrote:
           | The problem is more the inconsistent behavior. Styling is
           | also a concern, but why doesn't the Option element behave the
           | same in a datalist as in a select? (I think only Firefox
           | actually does this properly).
        
         | timw4mail wrote:
         | Yeah, it's really odd. Some browsers will only show the value,
         | some will show the label and the value, and some will
         | (properly) show the label when you have both a label and a
         | value.
         | 
         | It kind of drives me nuts that it doesn't work the same way as
         | the select element, when you are using option elements as a
         | list.
        
       | dynm wrote:
       | It's treated as an obvious thing in this document, but I was
       | surprised to learn about the <var> tag for mathematical
       | expressions: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
       | US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/va...
        
       | rekado wrote:
       | `details`/`summary` and `progress` have decent default styles in
       | picocss. I was under the impression that these elements were used
       | much more often in "modern" HTML than, for example, `map`/`area`
       | or `object` (yuck!).
        
       | Kwpolska wrote:
       | <datalist> might sound like a good idea, but it tends to be
       | inconsistent between browsers [1]. It also doesn't work on
       | Firefox on Android (both Focus and standard). It was also broken
       | in web views on Android for 1.5 years [2].
       | 
       | [1]: https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2020/02/09/when-html-is-not-
       | en... (disclaimer: my blog post, from 2 years ago, although most
       | of the issues apply today) [2]:
       | https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=949555
        
       | meigwilym wrote:
       | > 4. map & area
       | 
       | These take me back, but I'm trying to remember why I stopped
       | using them. Did they go out of fashion? Or was it accessibility
       | related?
        
         | jiggywiggy wrote:
         | Responsive reasons. Hardly ever can you do full absolute
         | positioning.
        
           | parminya wrote:
           | I think they died well before responsive became a concern.
           | Their heyday was really the time before not just CSS but even
           | tables, at which time they were the only way to have links
           | positioned in space rather than in flowing text. I don't
           | think anyone liked imagemaps - it's just that there was no
           | alternative.
           | 
           | But their limitations were massive. Chiefly, in a period when
           | dialup internet was becoming more common, an image map meant
           | that before a user could interact with your website, they had
           | to wait for a very slow download of a very large image that
           | contained mostly text. You couldn't interact with them any
           | more - no ability to select the text in them, or perhaps the
           | reader had a different color/font preference? Tough luck.
           | 
           | When tables came out, they began to face competition, but
           | they weren't defeated. Aside from table-first designs that
           | mixed images and text, you could mostly do without imagemaps
           | by cutting the image up, eliminating table
           | borders/cellpadding/cellspacing and making careful use of
           | colspan and rowspan, with a part of the image in each cell.
           | This had most of the same user-side problems as imagemaps,
           | but was easier for many people to maintain (I'm not sure
           | quite why: I assume some people have trouble with thinking in
           | terms of x/y coordinates and regions).
           | 
           | CSS thoroughly destroyed them. Everything an image map could
           | do, tables+CSS and eventually CSS could do better. This was
           | still ages before responsive became a concern, at a time when
           | webpage maintainers would assume you used an 800x600 or
           | 1024x768 screen with a maximized window and just ignore
           | everyone who didn't match that.
           | 
           | Nowadays, any time an image map might look like the solution,
           | the actual solution is SVG, which gives you everything an
           | image map had but is moreover correct.
        
         | superkuh wrote:
         | I think they went out of style because they weren't javascript.
         | But many older websites still use them to create fast loading,
         | universally supported, interactive data visualizations that JS
         | would still struggle to match. One of my favorites is the
         | dynamic space weather visualization from Lockheed Martin Solar
         | and Astrophysics Laboratory,
         | https://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/latest_events/
        
           | RedShift1 wrote:
           | What's interactive about that example?
        
             | the_third_wave wrote:
             | It'll load detailed pages based on the location of the
             | image you click. It might not be interactive in the modern
             | CSS-animated way but it does provide interaction with what
             | would otherwise be a static image.
        
         | Brajeshwar wrote:
         | I think because it was hard to write it manually unless you use
         | something like Ultradev/Dreamweaver.
        
           | otherme123 wrote:
           | I remember wasting a lot of time making one fancy map, only
           | to have people complaining about "where is the link to...?"
        
         | chrismorgan wrote:
         | They're not actually that useful in practice.
         | 
         | The era of imagemaps was one where they were raster images at a
         | fixed size, and when CSS wasn't particularly good for
         | interesting positioning and layout. Once you acknowledge
         | viewports are extremely variable in size, there's very little
         | place left for imagemaps, and so people stopped making the
         | kinds of designs that could benefit from it; and once you had
         | alpha channels and better CSS and cross-platform vector
         | graphics, there was even less place for traditional client-side
         | imagemaps.
         | 
         | (As for server-side imagemaps, ismap, no one ever really used
         | them. A few years ago I deliberately used them in order to just
         | barely support JavaScript-free operation on a toy just for the
         | sake of it, but they're very much a solution looking for a
         | problem these days.)
         | 
         | I haven't used an actual client-side imagemap for years; what I
         | _have_ done is used SVG as a form of better imagemap, not least
         | because you can actually target the areas with styles. The
         | imagemap in the article is approximately equal to this:
         | <svg viewBox="0 0 400 379" width="400" height="379"
         | fill="none">           <image href="workplace.jpg" width="400"
         | height="379"><desc>Workplace</desc></image>           <a
         | href="computer.html">               <title>Computer</title>
         | <rect x="34" y="34" width="270" height="350"/>           </a>
         | <a href="phone.html">               <title>Phone</title>
         | <rect x="290" y="172" width="333" height="250"/>           </a>
         | <a href="coffee.html">               <title>Cup of
         | coffee</title>               <circle cx="337" cy="300" r="44"/>
         | </a>       </svg>
         | 
         | But just think, now you can add rules like `a:hover { stroke:
         | blue; stroke-width: 2px; } a:focus { fill: lime }` (maybe with
         | some filter or mix-blend-mode).
        
         | irrational wrote:
         | Same. I remember using this feature extensively way back when.
         | But I can't remember when I stopped using it and what replaced
         | it. Hmm, now that I think about it, this was in the days before
         | we started using Flash. But after the Flash era we didn't go
         | back to using map.
        
         | Minor49er wrote:
         | They are still in use on Bandcamp for navigation in custom
         | headers
        
         | Agentlien wrote:
         | I was thinking of this just a few weeks ago! When I made my
         | first webpage in school (about 20 years ago) I used a sitemap
         | made out of an image with map. I was thinking back to it and
         | wondering whatever happened to that element.
        
         | vehemenz wrote:
         | You can still use them, but you need JavaScript calculations to
         | make sure the map still works when the image shrinks. Not a big
         | deal to be honest.
        
       | chazeon wrote:
       | In terms of <sub> and <sup>, I have to rely on them to write
       | equations in Markdown on GitHub due to its buggy MathJax
       | implementation (or previously, lack thereof).
        
       | keeganjw wrote:
       | I was literally just thinking about how to embed a PDF in a
       | webpage yesterday! Thanks for the info! Probably going to start
       | using most of these.
        
       | vehemenz wrote:
       | Here's one very few people know:                 <wbr/>
       | 
       | It works like a line break, but it only kicks in if the word
       | needs to be broken. Very useful for email/URL formatting on
       | mobile (along with &shy;).
        
         | chrismorgan wrote:
         | A subtlety to point out about <wbr> when comparing it to its
         | textual alternative ZWSP (U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE): if someone
         | copies the text (as _text_ --if it's copied as formatted HTML,
         | anything could happen), ZWSP will remain, whereas <wbr> will
         | disappear. You could exclude the ZWSP with something like
         | `user-select: none`. So really, <wbr> is kinda like <word-
         | break-opportunity style="user-select:none">&#x200b;</word-
         | break-opportunity>. My experience is that <wbr> is almost
         | always what you want rather than ZWSP.
         | 
         | There are similar but more obscure considerations with the
         | difference between <br> and a textual carriage return preserved
         | by `white-space: pre`. Take the document
         | data:text/html,<pre>a%0Ab<br>c</pre> (containing one carriage
         | return and one manual line break), and
         | document.body.textContent is "a\nbc" (the <br> disappears),
         | while document.body.innerText is "a\nb\nc" (<br> becomes \n).
         | As for removing the line breaks from what goes on the clipboard
         | (which is desirable if you're choosing visually-optimal break
         | points manually), well, that's unreliable. I've only ever tried
         | it on Firefox, but tricks like `user-select: none` on a line
         | break of either kind don't work, netting you _two_ line breaks
         | for some reason; wrapping each line in something like  <span
         | style="display:block"> can work.
        
       | rekabis wrote:
       | SUB/SUP, MAP/AREA, and ABBR have all been in frequent use since
       | the beginning.
       | 
       | MAP/AREA in particular was extensively used before table-based
       | layouts. It was only once tables were added to HTML that
       | individual images could be arranged into one large seamless-
       | looking image while each piece was surrounded by its own anchor.
       | Before that point, using MAP/AREA was a developer's only option.
        
       | mattlondon wrote:
       | 1997 called, they want their cool elements back.
        
         | Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
         | Yeah, why use simple HTML elements when you can use a few
         | thousand lines of JavaScript instead?
        
       | franga2000 wrote:
       | Having used all of these in the past, here's why this is the
       | case:
       | 
       | 1. meter/progress - default style looks dated, styling works
       | different on different browsers, the color scale options are
       | confusing
       | 
       | 2. sup/sub & 7. abbr - these are only useful for page content (as
       | opposed to site design), which is usually WYSIWYG or something
       | like Markdown. Many editors/parsers don't support it, at least by
       | default.
       | 
       | 4. map/area - it's absolute positioning, which is unusable for
       | the variety of devices we use today
       | 
       | 5. detail/summary - it's also more content than design and has
       | basically no support in content editors, but it has been growing
       | in popularity in things like GitHub READMEs where only basic
       | markup is allowed.
       | 
       | 6. object - hard to know what filetypes will be supported and
       | little feedback when they aren't. It usually safer to either
       | include a JS reader with your site or just download the file.
        
         | Gormo wrote:
         | > default style looks dated
         | 
         | Browser defaults for all HTML elements look "dated". The visual
         | appearance of meter, as with all elements, is adjusted via CSS.
         | 
         | > . map/area - it's absolute positioning, which is unusable for
         | the variety of devices we use today
         | 
         | It's relative to the image dimensions, not the page/viewport.
        
         | cantSpellSober wrote:
         | Until it's easier to add bloated animations to details/summary
         | the designers will never let us use em
        
         | sebazzz wrote:
         | The problem with detail/summary is that in some browsers that
         | element is hard to style correctly and always turns out to be
         | so limited that you ask yourself why you don't fully develop
         | this functionality manually and put some aria attributes on it
         | for good WCAG2.1 measure.
         | 
         | Also applies to progress, for which you need to use obscure
         | browser-specific CSS rules.
        
         | bawolff wrote:
         | > object - hard to know what filetypes will be supported and
         | little feedback when they aren't.
         | 
         | Easier now that plugins are dead and <object> is basically
         | equivalent to <iframe>
        
         | clairity wrote:
         | to keep track of all of these in my personal css framework, i
         | made an entry in the base stylesheet for every html element,
         | even including a couple deprecated but widely supported ones (i
         | also keep a list of fully deprecated elements in comments),
         | though not every element gets styled beyond the default.
         | 
         |  _meter /progress_ can be styled consistently, but it's tricky
         | because of the browser inconsistencies you mention. it took a
         | lot of playing around with weird vendor-prefixed pseudos to get
         | these looking similar across platforms.
         | 
         |  _sub /sub/abbr_ just need to be normalized first -
         | normalize.css is a good reference for this. _abbr_ can be
         | useful for providing short  "aside" info on a word/phrase in a
         | semantic way.
         | 
         | styling _detail /summary_ is relatively easy and they're pretty
         | useful for FAQs and the like. i see web designers experimenting
         | with more and more these days.
         | 
         |  _map /area_, i don't use, but have seen it used on
         | experimental designs to neat effect. and _object_ is as you
         | said, hard to predict for styling.
         | 
         | ps - it looks like chrome (105) will finally support mathML
         | along with firefox and safari, so perhaps that will impact
         | sub/sup usage in the future.
        
         | statico wrote:
         | For some reason <object> makes me anxious. Is there some memory
         | of the Flash/ActionScript days, or maybe ActiveX or something,
         | that causes me to frown at seeing a mention of <object>?
        
           | derefr wrote:
           | <object> is supposed to be for exposing modules from hosted
           | runtimes into the host execution-context as, well, objects
           | (in the OOP sense. Or the COM sense, I suppose.)
           | 
           | The original use-case would have been something like: imagine
           | you code a game physics engine in Java, and deploy it as a
           | Java applet. You can embed that physics engine into a page as
           | an <object> -- and then _consume_ it as a local API using
           | JavaScript embedded on the same page.
           | 
           | (And yes, this is almost certainly the real reason JavaScript
           | is called "JavaScript." When it was created, it was precisely
           | positioned as a glue language for consuming/driving Java-
           | applet APIs!)
           | 
           | Java-applet-based APIs (and their Windows-proprietary ActiveX
           | cousins) are dead, so there's no real reason to care about
           | <object> any more. As long as the browser knows how to render
           | the media if you navigate directly to its URL, you can just
           | use an <iframe>.
        
             | statico wrote:
             | Ah ha! It was Java applets that makes me dread seeing
             | <object>/<embed> tags again. Gotta support IE, you know.
             | Netscape will crash anyway.
        
           | cantSpellSober wrote:
           | Probably, <object> to me will always be "the thing SWFObject
           | used for rendering a Flash container"
        
         | commandlinefan wrote:
         | That was my first thought... if people don't use these very old
         | elements any more, there's probably a good Chesterson's fence-
         | type reason. Frames seemed really cool when I first saw them
         | too, until I actually started trying to support them.
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | Frames died when AJAX became available. People were
           | bastardizing frames so that they could change the content in
           | a window without refershing the entire window.
        
             | dspillett wrote:
             | That was largely iframes, though they are still in use for
             | some things like certain methods of ad delivery.
             | frames/framesets were often about partial updates, but
             | mostly where script wasn't wanted so AJAX (once available)
             | wasn't an option either.
        
               | WorldMaker wrote:
               | Having lived through that era, Frames (and Framesets)
               | were mostly killed by the proliferation of PHP on cheap
               | hosts. A lot of Frames were used for building navigation
               | elements without a lot of copy/pasting between HTML files
               | (headers, footers, navigation bars, etc). The alternative
               | to frames was either copy/pasting or ancient early static
               | site generators. When PHP became common and cheap most
               | people moved to server-side inclusions. These days we've
               | come full circle back around to static sites but not
               | returned to frames simply by how much static site
               | generators have either become more common and/or
               | easier/better to use.
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | >but not returned to frames
               | 
               | also, CSS Flex
        
           | thiht wrote:
           | Meter, progress and details/summary are from HTML5 so
           | definitely not "very old"
        
             | bshimmin wrote:
             | I only bothered to check `details`, but that one dates back
             | to at least the 2008 working draft of the HTML5 spec, which
             | makes it ~14 years old - not absolutely ancient, but far
             | from recent!
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-10-03 23:02 UTC)