We’re all familiar with things like marquee and blink, relics of HTML of the past, but there are far more weird and obscure HTML tags you may not be aware of. Luckily, Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell details a few of them so we can all scratch shake our heads in disbelief.
But there are far more obscure tags which are perhaps less visually dazzling but equally or even more interesting. If you’re younger, this might very well be your introduction to them. If you’re older, this still might be an introduction, but also possibly a trip down memory lane or a flashback to the horrors of the first browser war. It depends.
↫ Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell
I think my favourite is the dir tag, intended to be used to display lists of files and directories. We’re supposed to use list tags now to achieve the same result, but I do kind of like the idea of having a dedicated tag to indicate files, and perhaps have browsers render these lists in the same way the file manager of the platform it’s running on does. I don’t know if that was possible, but it seems like the logical continuation of a hypothetical dir tag.
Anyway, should we implement bgsound on OSNews?
oh yes! someone can polish off their midi skills and make a custom osnews theme!
I remember using most of those tags at one time, but not bgsound. 🙂
I also remember seeing a number of those tags on OS News 25 years ago when I would look at the site source. 😉
I do feel we lost our way when moved almost everything to CSS.
HTML is elegant, and can be well structured, while css, while having clases and hierachy, is just a complete mess and even needs tags like ng-deep in angular, to force one style over others also applies to the same component, by other parts/css-files of the code. I did like css when was inline in the HTML. Now? It became garbage.
Also, the pages being almost 100% rendered by Javascript nowadays is very, very bad.
I think you may be conflating the sins of monstrosities like Angular and React with CSS. Defining presentation in stylesheets is a huge and sensible improvement on littering HTML with font elements and spacer GIFs, not to mention HTML alone could never have supported everything CSS does, short of turning into a much worse version of it. (Not that I think CSS is perfect, by any means.)
The biggest problem with CSS is that so many people (and JavaScript frameworks) don’t want to work with the *cascading* part.
Amen to that! I really can’t stand Tailwind &c.