They’re easily overlooked between all the Chrome and Safari violence, but there are still text-based web browsers, and people still use them. How do they handle the latest HTML features?
While CSS is the star of the show when it comes to new features, HTML ain’t stale either. If we put the long-awaited styleable selects and Apple’s take on toggle switches aside, there’s a lot readily available cross-browser.
But here’s the thing: Whenever we say cross-browser, we usually look at the big ones, never at text-based browsers. So in this article I wanna shed some light on how they handle the following recent additions.
↫ Matthias Zöchling
Text-based web browsers work best with regular HTML, as things like CSS and JavaScript won’t work. Despite the new features highlighted in the article being HTML, however, text-based browser have a hard time dealing with them, and it’s likely that as more and more modern features get added to HTML, text-based browsers are going to have an increasingly harder time dealing with the web.
At least OSNews seems to render decently usable on text-based web browsers, but ideal it is not. I don’t really have the skills to fix any issues on that front, but I can note that I’m working on a extremely basic, HTML-only version of OSNews generated from our RSS feed, hosted on some very unique retro hardware. I can’t guarantee it’ll become available – I’m weary about hosting something from home using unique hardware and outdated software – but if it does, y’all will know about it, of course.
