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The graveyard of HTML attributes which never gained public attention/usage is large and full of useful ideas. My favourite was relational links such as <

by ktpsns 5y ago

The graveyard of HTML attributes which never gained public attention/usage is large and full of useful ideas. My favourite was relational links such as <link rel='first' href='/de' title='Homepage' /> <link rel='prev' href='/some/bunnies.php' title='Previous Page about bunnies' /> <link rel='next' href='/some/cats.php' title='Next page about cats' /> <link rel="copyright" href="/de/impressum.php" title="Impressum"> <link rel="alternate" href="/gr/samepage.php" hreflang="gr" title="Page name in greek"> Opera was the only browser which had a toolbar with these relational links. This was around mid-2000. Unfortunately, this toolbar never survived or got taken over by other browsers. Some relations survived (such as rel="search" for custom search pages), some got killed-by-ecosystem (such as RSS).

dfox 5y ago
Mozilla Suite also had toolbar for this kind of links. And early versions of Firefox either had it too or there was extension for it.
oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
I've made use of those even recently. Even if they're not used much now, it's potential future-proofing. And I've written tools that manage content and read these values to organise pages in a series.
- clairity 5y ago
  yah, rel links are still usuable at least for machine-read purposes, if not the old 'back', 'forward', 'up', type site navigation links that browsers used to display if those were present in the document.
- novocantico 5y ago
  Who knows, maybe someone who works on Chrome or Edge or Safari is reading this thread and will talk to their higher-ups about using it somehow. (Wishful thinking?)
edeion 5y ago
I seem to remember this was used by emacs' mode embedding the w3m browser. It was great to read long structured documentation sites by just pressing space-bar to "scroll" through pages.
WorldMaker 5y ago
I recall IE (even up through "Spartan" Edge, I think) had a hard to discover/not quite as useful in practice as it was in theory support for prev/next links: if you pressed the browser's forward keyboard shortcut or gesture (but not the toolbar button since that was usually disabled) when there was no forward history it would sometimes follow next links. Even harder to pull off in practice (given how most people navigate to websites from searches and stuff) if you somehow managed to land on a page with no back history and pulled off a back keyboard shortcut or gesture it would try the page's prev link. I think that feature probably confused way more people than anyone ever came to rely on it.
gjvnq 5y ago
You can show these things via CSS. By default they have `display: none` but you can change it something like `display: inline` so <link> appears just like <a>. You may need JavaScript to make the clicking work.
- gmfawcett 5y ago
  These <link/> attributes belonged in the <head>. It was page metadata, not a page element: the browser itself was supposed to give you controls for forward, back, etc.
dheera 5y ago
Why do we have shit like `enterkeyhint` but not some really simple things like <input type="slider" min="0" max="100" step="10" name="foo"> <input type="toggle" value="true" name="bar">
- detaro 5y ago
  We have the first, it's just not called "slider".
  - throwanem 5y ago
    It's called "range", and I didn't know about it either: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input/range https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in... And a "toggle" input is just a checkbox.
- mahathu 5y ago
  you mean range and checkbox inputs? (they both exist)
  - dheera 5y ago
    range -- damn, nobody told me checkbox -- not a toggle, requires incredible pecking accuracy on mobile, non-hummingbirds cannot use
    - detaro 5y ago
      > requires incredible pecking accuracy on mobile, non-hummingbirds cannot use At least that part is easily solved: Assign a label to the checkbox, label is tap-able. nice large target. Styling it to look like a native toggle control is harder.
      - 6510 5y ago
        I remember that as the first time when using default styling of basic elements produced unusable results. I have to ask, when did it become my job to solve things like this?? Hidden check boxes with a check box in a label is not a nice elegant way of styling something at all. It's closer to an ugly hack. I find it an upsetting development given how well everything else was designed. It seems we are going to get more good ideas in unfinished form? The definition of a range is: "the area of variation between upper and lower limits on a particular scale." Why would the user only get to configure 1 of the 2? The definition of a slider is: a knob or lever that is moved horizontally or vertically to control a variable, such as the volume of a radio. enterkeyhint="next" conceptually a great idea. Sadly it doesn't do anything? I wanted an attribute that makes the button go to the "next field". Easily fixed by every developer individually a million+ times deep into the future.
ars 5y ago
> Opera was the only browser which had a toolbar with these relational links. Frefox had it to, it's this famous bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2800 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2800 opened 24 years ago. They had a toolbar for it for a while, and I used it for forums and search results. And then they got rid of the toolbar, and the rel link because used only for search engines.
ademarre 5y ago
Google search used to use rel=prev/next to identify paginated sequences for indexing, but not anymore. https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1108717486424363009 https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1108717486424363009 As of 2019, Bing was looking at those links for URL discovery. https://twitter.com/CoperniX/status/1108790528773021696 https://twitter.com/CoperniX/status/1108790528773021696
maps7 5y ago
Your post was something of a blast from the past for me: toolbars! I had forgotten about those. I used to spend a lot of time customizing those. Then Chrome was released which really was the end for browser toolbars.
6510 5y ago
In opera back in the days, if you pressed the space bar, it would scroll down like all browsers but if you got to the end of the page it would load the rel="next" or any link with <a>next..</a> in it.

by ktpsns 5y ago

dfox 5y ago

Mozilla Suite also had toolbar for this kind of links. And early versions of Firefox either had it too or there was extension for it.

oneeyedpigeon 5y ago

I've made use of those even recently. Even if they're not used much now, it's potential future-proofing. And I've written tools that manage content and read these values to organise pages in a series.

clairity 5y ago
yah, rel links are still usuable at least for machine-read purposes, if not the old 'back', 'forward', 'up', type site navigation links that browsers used to display if those were present in the document.
novocantico 5y ago
Who knows, maybe someone who works on Chrome or Edge or Safari is reading this thread and will talk to their higher-ups about using it somehow. (Wishful thinking?)

edeion 5y ago

I seem to remember this was used by emacs' mode embedding the w3m browser. It was great to read long structured documentation sites by just pressing space-bar to "scroll" through pages.

WorldMaker 5y ago

I recall IE (even up through "Spartan" Edge, I think) had a hard to discover/not quite as useful in practice as it was in theory support for prev/next links: if you pressed the browser's forward keyboard shortcut or gesture (but not the toolbar button since that was usually disabled) when there was no forward history it would sometimes follow next links. Even harder to pull off in practice (given how most people navigate to websites from searches and stuff) if you somehow managed to land on a page with no back history and pulled off a back keyboard shortcut or gesture it would try the page's prev link. I think that feature probably confused way more people than anyone ever came to rely on it.

gjvnq 5y ago

You can show these things via CSS. By default they have `display: none` but you can change it something like `display: inline` so <link> appears just like <a>. You may need JavaScript to make the clicking work.

gmfawcett 5y ago
These <link/> attributes belonged in the <head>. It was page metadata, not a page element: the browser itself was supposed to give you controls for forward, back, etc.

dheera 5y ago

Why do we have shit like `enterkeyhint` but not some really simple things like <input type="slider" min="0" max="100" step="10" name="foo"> <input type="toggle" value="true" name="bar">

detaro 5y ago
We have the first, it's just not called "slider".
- throwanem 5y ago
  It's called "range", and I didn't know about it either: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input/range https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in... And a "toggle" input is just a checkbox.
mahathu 5y ago
you mean range and checkbox inputs? (they both exist)
- dheera 5y ago
  range -- damn, nobody told me checkbox -- not a toggle, requires incredible pecking accuracy on mobile, non-hummingbirds cannot use
  - detaro 5y ago
    > requires incredible pecking accuracy on mobile, non-hummingbirds cannot use At least that part is easily solved: Assign a label to the checkbox, label is tap-able. nice large target. Styling it to look like a native toggle control is harder.
    - 6510 5y ago
      I remember that as the first time when using default styling of basic elements produced unusable results. I have to ask, when did it become my job to solve things like this?? Hidden check boxes with a check box in a label is not a nice elegant way of styling something at all. It's closer to an ugly hack. I find it an upsetting development given how well everything else was designed. It seems we are going to get more good ideas in unfinished form? The definition of a range is: "the area of variation between upper and lower limits on a particular scale." Why would the user only get to configure 1 of the 2? The definition of a slider is: a knob or lever that is moved horizontally or vertically to control a variable, such as the volume of a radio. enterkeyhint="next" conceptually a great idea. Sadly it doesn't do anything? I wanted an attribute that makes the button go to the "next field". Easily fixed by every developer individually a million+ times deep into the future.

ars 5y ago

> Opera was the only browser which had a toolbar with these relational links. Frefox had it to, it's this famous bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2800 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2800 opened 24 years ago. They had a toolbar for it for a while, and I used it for forums and search results. And then they got rid of the toolbar, and the rel link because used only for search engines.

ademarre 5y ago

Google search used to use rel=prev/next to identify paginated sequences for indexing, but not anymore. https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1108717486424363009 https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1108717486424363009 As of 2019, Bing was looking at those links for URL discovery. https://twitter.com/CoperniX/status/1108790528773021696 https://twitter.com/CoperniX/status/1108790528773021696

maps7 5y ago

Your post was something of a blast from the past for me: toolbars! I had forgotten about those. I used to spend a lot of time customizing those. Then Chrome was released which really was the end for browser toolbars.

6510 5y ago

In opera back in the days, if you pressed the space bar, it would scroll down like all browsers but if you got to the end of the page it would load the rel="next" or any link with <a>next..</a> in it.