5 ms·

What's the point of removing features such as "menu" from HTML standard? If there are browsers supporting it and webpages using it, would Mozilla (or Google or

by magnat 9y ago

What's the point of removing features such as "menu" from HTML standard? If there are browsers supporting it and webpages using it, would Mozilla (or Google or Microsoft) actually remove those features just because newest standard said so? I mean: marquee was deprecated long ago, yet browsers still render it correctly.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sureaboutthis 9y ago
<marquee> has never been part of any HTML standard, ever. It is listed as an obsolete feature in the HTML5 standard for the point of making it obsolete (a weird reason) but not mentioned anywhere else since time began. I don't recall the reasons for removing <menu>
geofft 9y ago
<isindex> got removed from browsers, which I personally find kind of sad because that's what I learned in 1995 and I've written a web page that uses it. But it's weird and does nothing that a normal form couldn't do, so the browsers seem to want to deprecate it.
- domenicd 9y ago
  The biggest weirdness about it was that it was essentially a parser macro, not an element. That is, at parse time, it expanded into a form/label/hr/input set of elements into the token stream. Super-bizzare. See the removal patch at https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/5c44abc734eb483f9a7ec79da5844d2fe63d9c3b https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/5c44abc734eb483f9a7ec7....
kenbellows 9y ago
I can't speak for the spec authors, but IMHO, tags should be deprecated and eventually removed when they are deemed to be useless, especially when their functions and/or semantics are covered by another tag, and especially when their use is harmful (or rather, more harmful than beneficial). In my (very personal) opinion, an HTML tag or attribute, and more generally a feature of any design/development framework, should be considered possibly harmful if it: - presents possible security problems; for examples, consider some of the points listed here: https://html5sec.org/ https://html5sec.org/ - promotes poor usability or accessibility; e.g. interactive tooltips with links or controls in them, for example, are quite difficult to make accessible, and I wouldn't want an HTML <tooltip> tag without a lot of discussion about accessibility - promotes anti-patterns; e.g., at this point I think <marquee>-style scrolling informational text is an anti-pattern in a web context, since it can the text much harder to read, especially on small screens Of course, none of these concerns should lead to immediate removal of a thing as soon as they're pointed out, but they should be discussed and considered. It's a cost-benefit analysis: what does this feature actually buy us that isn't easily achievable with other features, what problems is it causing and how severe are they, and are the benefits worth the problems? As for <menu>, my guess, though I haven't been able to find the actual discussion, is that it was removed because its semantics are somewhat in conflict with <nav>, and probably its most common use was custom context (aka "right-click") menus, which bring a lot of accessibility problems with them. I don't know that I agree with the decision to remove it altogether, since I think its use to semantically identify and group web application controls is very valuable and not covered by any other tags (though I'd love to be corrected), but I do think that context menus, which to me seems like the most common use for the <menu> tag, are a very problematic design element. Again, it's a balance; is it worth the problems it causes? I guess the authors decided it wasn't. (Just to reiterate, I don't know why <menu> was removed, I'm just guessing. If anyone can find any of the discussions about <menu> and the problems with it, I'd love to read more.)
- domenicd 9y ago
  I haven't looked at the W3C fork of our work, but in the actual HTML Standard (maintained at the WHATWG), menu was not completely removed---just the mostly-unimplemented context menu feature. We left menu as a semantic alternative to ol/ul for menu-like lists. See more at https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/2742 https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/2742 --- For more on removals within the WHATWG process, see: - https://whatwg.org/faq#removing-bad-ideas https://whatwg.org/faq#removing-bad-ideas - https://whatwg.org/working-mode#removals https://whatwg.org/working-mode#removals There's also the case of things like marquee, which are not removed, but just marked as obsolete and something that web developers must not use. (Which in practice means that conformance checkers like https://checker.html5.org/ https://checker.html5.org/ are required to complain about them; it doens't mean there's some godlike web-developer-enforcement committee going around preventing you from writing code that uses marquee.) Their implementation requirements are still in the spec; see e.g. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#the-marquee-element https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#the-mar... and https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/rendering.html#the-marquee-element-2 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/rendering.html#the-ma.... (Same for frame/frameset, by the way.)
rlanday 9y ago
Whether or not to remove a web platform feature from a browser basically comes down to how many people are using it vs. what is the maintenance cost. I suspect that browsers continue to support <marquee> so they can continue to render all those great webpages from the late 1990s properly.

by magnat 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sureaboutthis 9y ago

<marquee> has never been part of any HTML standard, ever. It is listed as an obsolete feature in the HTML5 standard for the point of making it obsolete (a weird reason) but not mentioned anywhere else since time began. I don't recall the reasons for removing <menu>

geofft 9y ago

<isindex> got removed from browsers, which I personally find kind of sad because that's what I learned in 1995 and I've written a web page that uses it. But it's weird and does nothing that a normal form couldn't do, so the browsers seem to want to deprecate it.

domenicd 9y ago
The biggest weirdness about it was that it was essentially a parser macro, not an element. That is, at parse time, it expanded into a form/label/hr/input set of elements into the token stream. Super-bizzare. See the removal patch at https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/5c44abc734eb483f9a7ec79da5844d2fe63d9c3b https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/5c44abc734eb483f9a7ec7....

kenbellows 9y ago

I can't speak for the spec authors, but IMHO, tags should be deprecated and eventually removed when they are deemed to be useless, especially when their functions and/or semantics are covered by another tag, and especially when their use is harmful (or rather, more harmful than beneficial). In my (very personal) opinion, an HTML tag or attribute, and more generally a feature of any design/development framework, should be considered possibly harmful if it: - presents possible security problems; for examples, consider some of the points listed here: https://html5sec.org/ https://html5sec.org/ - promotes poor usability or accessibility; e.g. interactive tooltips with links or controls in them, for example, are quite difficult to make accessible, and I wouldn't want an HTML <tooltip> tag without a lot of discussion about accessibility - promotes anti-patterns; e.g., at this point I think <marquee>-style scrolling informational text is an anti-pattern in a web context, since it can the text much harder to read, especially on small screens Of course, none of these concerns should lead to immediate removal of a thing as soon as they're pointed out, but they should be discussed and considered. It's a cost-benefit analysis: what does this feature actually buy us that isn't easily achievable with other features, what problems is it causing and how severe are they, and are the benefits worth the problems? As for <menu>, my guess, though I haven't been able to find the actual discussion, is that it was removed because its semantics are somewhat in conflict with <nav>, and probably its most common use was custom context (aka "right-click") menus, which bring a lot of accessibility problems with them. I don't know that I agree with the decision to remove it altogether, since I think its use to semantically identify and group web application controls is very valuable and not covered by any other tags (though I'd love to be corrected), but I do think that context menus, which to me seems like the most common use for the <menu> tag, are a very problematic design element. Again, it's a balance; is it worth the problems it causes? I guess the authors decided it wasn't. (Just to reiterate, I don't know why <menu> was removed, I'm just guessing. If anyone can find any of the discussions about <menu> and the problems with it, I'd love to read more.)

domenicd 9y ago
I haven't looked at the W3C fork of our work, but in the actual HTML Standard (maintained at the WHATWG), menu was not completely removed---just the mostly-unimplemented context menu feature. We left menu as a semantic alternative to ol/ul for menu-like lists. See more at https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/2742 https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/2742 --- For more on removals within the WHATWG process, see: - https://whatwg.org/faq#removing-bad-ideas https://whatwg.org/faq#removing-bad-ideas - https://whatwg.org/working-mode#removals https://whatwg.org/working-mode#removals There's also the case of things like marquee, which are not removed, but just marked as obsolete and something that web developers must not use. (Which in practice means that conformance checkers like https://checker.html5.org/ https://checker.html5.org/ are required to complain about them; it doens't mean there's some godlike web-developer-enforcement committee going around preventing you from writing code that uses marquee.) Their implementation requirements are still in the spec; see e.g. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#the-marquee-element https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#the-mar... and https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/rendering.html#the-marquee-element-2 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/rendering.html#the-ma.... (Same for frame/frameset, by the way.)

rlanday 9y ago

Whether or not to remove a web platform feature from a browser basically comes down to how many people are using it vs. what is the maintenance cost. I suspect that browsers continue to support <marquee> so they can continue to render all those great webpages from the late 1990s properly.