8 ms·
Why isn't the <html> element 100% supported on caniuse.com?
- OJFord 3y ago> MDN used to stand for Mozilla Developer Network. Now it’s just MDN. I spent a few minutes looking on the MDN site to see if I could find any mention of the full name, but I guess they’re just all in on “MDN” now. Huh, yeah, nerd-sniped on that one; I can't find anything either.
- jakub_g 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs
- OJFord 3y agoNow you link it, I vaguely remember it being a big deal around the time they dropped Servo and load of Rust people left (/were made redundant?), both as part of a broader shakeup/refocusing.
- Bellend 3y agoI remember a few years ago that Microsoft docs started to point to Mozilla docs, maybe part of Edge rebrand? Perhaps renaming to MDN during this agreement could leave someone like "huh is it M(ozilla)DN or M(icrosoft)DN??". I have no clue.
- doubled112 3y agoBut M(icrosoft)DN was MSDN.
- tentacleuno 3y agoObligatory Wikipedia article[0]. For the curious, MSDN is now called Microsoft Docs. To the surprise of many, much of the documentation on the site is also open-source[1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Developer_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Developer_Network [1]: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs
- jonathanlydall 3y agoYour information is a little out of date, Microsoft Docs became part of Microsoft Learn, so MSDN is actually now Microsoft Learn, or part of it at least.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoWhat's the surprise about documentation being open source? The overwhelming majority of the source is going to consist of the text of the documentation, which is open anyway.
- chrisfinazzo 3y agoThis is the point in the discussion where I'll point out that .NET started out as ".NET Passport", e.g, what people now think of as a Microsoft Account. See also Apple, who, after a relatively brief dalliance with the name iTools, rebranded its online service as ".mac". Sigh... I miss early Internet names like these, although I suppose the fact that the original dot com era didn't last and a bunch of early startups got wiped out - Pets.com, anyone? - gave it a stench that marketers were all too willing to run away from at the first possible opportunity.
- lupire 3y ago.NET was terrible. .net already meant something else.
- Waterluvian 3y agoThat’s a clever and thoughtful idea, but those responsible for branding at Microsoft would burn the entire place down if this was ever to be the case.
- vdaea 3y agoIt's in the url bar.
- OJFord 3y agoNo it isn't, there's no 'network' and the order is different, and that's not what's discussed anyway. Though I suppose if the URL really was mozilla.developer.network it would make it less interesting whether the pages ever spelled it or not.
- pfgallagher 3y agoSearching for: site:https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ "mozilla developer network" yielded ~115 results on Google
- GavinAnderegg 3y agoIt is mentioned by its old name in older blog posts, but there seems to have been a rebrand to just "MDN". For example, there's no explanation of what MDN stands for on the About page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/about https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/about
- stordoff 3y agoThere's a couple of mentions of it in side pages and in example code, but that's all I can find: > will soon be a proud part of the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/mdn-observatory/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/mdn-observatory/ (posted 25 October 2023) > Their brilliant but offbeat idea grew into today's Mozilla Developer Network https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/At_ten https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/At_ten (last modified 25 January 2024) > const heading = <h1>Mozilla Developer Network</h1>; https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_testing/Client-side_JavaScript_frameworks/React_getting_started https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...
- dylanpyle 3y agoThis change happened right about August 15, 2017... which I know only because somehow I happened to notice at the right moment where the branding had been updated but the page <title> had not. Here's the bug report I filed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1390381 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1390381
- newzisforsukas 3y agohttps://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brings-microsoft-google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brings-microsoft...
- JoshWVS 3y agoI like calling these "anachronyms," because they're sort of like anachronistic acronyms (yes, fine, this one's _technically_ an initialism). I wrote a blog post[0] about them. [0]: https://simpsonian.ca/blog/anachronyms/ https://simpsonian.ca/blog/anachronyms/
- Nition 3y agoARM might be another good one. Acorn computers don't even exist anymore.
- Angostura 3y agoSun Microsystems - came from Stanford University Network Apple's Siri, came from SRI - Stanford Research Institute
- sgerenser 3y agoIt’s no longer even an acronym, the official name is now Arm.
- Nition 3y agoThat's what I mean - that's how the parent defined an "anachronym". But yeah, there was that transitional phase where they first just redefined the acronym.
- Dylan16807 3y agoBut also, even later they got rid of the all-caps (at least mostly). It went from an acronym of nothing to just a word.
- djur 3y agoIsn't it "Arm" because it's British and Brits typically write pronounceable acronyms in proper noun case (e.g. "Nato" vs. "UN")?
- atopal 3y agoWe made that change around 2017. Mozilla Developer Network is somewhat ambiguous. In surveys and user interviews people were confused about the name. Web developers thought it might be a resource specifically for Mozilla developers, which to be fair was the focus in the earlier days. The web platform documentation was just one part of many Mozilla related things documented on MDN for some time. In 2017 though the web platform documentation had grown to make up 95% of MDN's traffic and it had become clear that it was not primarily a resource for Mozilla developers anymore, the name change to "MDN Web Docs" was intended to reflect that change in focus.
- susam 3y agoWhen the expansion of the first letter of an acronym becomes obsolete, I think it is a good opportunity to turn the acronym into a recursive acronym, e.g., MDN = MDN Developer Network.
- patze 3y agoThis reminds me on the recursive XNA acronym which stands for “XNA’s not acronymed”.
- lordchair 3y agoOr GNU which is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!" source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU#Name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU#Name
- susam 3y agoNice one! Thanks for sharing! One of my most favourite recursive acronyms is XINU which stands for "XINU Is Not Unix". The delightful thing about this acronym is that "XINU" is also the reverse of "UNIX". Upon a closer look, it turns out that for a given word W, a recursive acronym proclaiming that it is not W while simultaneously being the reverse of the word W, we need W to be of the form W = "?NI?" where each "?" denotes a distinct letter. Some fictitious examples: * ANIL ⇒ LINA = LINA Is Not ANIL. * KNIT ⇒ TINK = TINK Is Not KNIT. Words of the form "?N?" also work if we are happy with a contracted "is" in the acronym. In fact we can get circular recursive acronyms in such cases: * ANI = ANI's Not INA ⇔ INA = INA's Not ANI. * ONE = ONE's Not ENO ⇔ ENO = ENO's Not ONE. Both acronyms in each pair refer to each other thus making them circular while also being the reverse of each other! These could be useful names to express friendly banter between rival projects.
- nerdile 3y agoHint: check the blog posts. As recent as October 2023.
- Shorel 3y agoNow it stands for the Mweb Developer Network xD
- account42 3y agoMԍp Developer Network
- jonathanlydall 3y agoMweb is the name of a South African ISP. Interestingly, they were one of the very first ISPs that I can remember, certainly one of the, if not the, most advertised to consumers at the time and I think it is the only ISP which still exists today from those very early days. I wouldn’t ever use them personally, an apt analogy might be that choosing them today is like choosing AOL in the US.
- phyzome 3y agoProbably worth breaking out a separate feature "html-manifest" on caniuse. Also, I want to echo that MDN is a fantastic resource.
- starkparker 3y ago> a lot of the data on the site actually comes from MDN Eh... not really. The feature support matrix (as linked on CanIUse) comes from MDN's browser-compat-data repo. Here's the HTML element's source data: https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/blob/main/html/elements/html.json https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/blob/main/html/el... This doesn't contain the testing and usage info that CanIUse cites for support, though, just which browser versions included which features. CanIUse also points to their own repo, which contains a lot of data: https://github.com/fyrd/caniuse https://github.com/fyrd/caniuse But I can't find an easy entry point to find where they're getting the numbers for a specific element. The data on there seems to be primarily for features. So the more precise question is, where is CanIUse getting HTML element testing and usage numbers from? Because that seems to be the issue.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- amelius 3y agoShouldn't the html element have a support percentage at least as low as any other element?
- zamadatix 3y agoNah, the <html> element doesn't represent "all of HTML" or anything it just means "the root element of the document" - just another element. As someone else noted it's not actually even required to have a valid error-free HTML document, for that only <!doctype html> and a valid <title> are. An analogy might be having a valid understanding and parsing of what "English" as part of an essay heading is unrelated to knowing what "fustigate" means despite the latter being an English word.
- GavinAnderegg 3y agoInterestingly, it was also pointed out to me that the `a` and `p` elements have exactly the same 97.34% support. Both of these elements have data coming from MDN like the `html` element. See: https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_a https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_a and https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_p https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_p I've updated the article to note this.
- therealmarv 3y agoIs this related to the most minimal valid HTML? No HTML tag there. <!DOCTYPE html><title> </title>
- zamadatix 3y agoIt doesn't seem particularly related as <title> has about the same percentage: https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_title https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_title. Rather it seems more to do with how it counts browsers it knows the usage of but doesn't have validation of support one way or the other for. Trivia: That HTML is actually invalid, <title> </title> gets treated as a blank title, which is not valid. If you change it to <title>.</title> or similar it should be error free though.
- runarberg 3y agoIsn’t there an <html> tag there though? It is just untyped, and therefor inferred. If you open this page with any browser, it will contain an <html> tag.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Mogzol 3y agoThe difference is that it is actually valid according to the HTML spec. Browsers will render lots of invalid HTML which is shorter than that, but if you put such HTML in a validator such as [1], it will have errors. Putting <!DOCTYPE html><title>.</title> in that validator returns no errors (it does have a warning though). Although in response to OP's question, no, I don't think it is related. [1] https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea
- chrismorgan 3y agoWhen framed in a protocol that can convey a title otherwise, such as email with its Subject header, <title> is optional. So the shortest valid HTML is just <!DOCTYPE html> and no more—it’s just only valid in certain contexts.
- drewtato 3y agoIt's nice to have something that the humans know with absolute certainty so that we know much to trust the machines.
- barbazoo 3y ago> So yeah, I don’t have a great answer for this. If you do, please let me know!
- masswerk 3y agoWe could come up with a fun explanation, like the "secret browser" [1] in Android being responsible for this seemingly un-trackable aberration. :-) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39226754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39226754
- rezonant 3y agoYou'll notice that CanIUse has a "% of all" option right above the Global percentage. If you dig into the gear wheel on a feature you'll see more information about this: Usage calculation: ( ) All Users: Any usage % of browsers not tracked by caniuse is considered unsupported. ( ) All tracked users: Excludes the usage percentage of browsers not tracked on caniuse. This implies that CanIUse pulls in data about global browser usage, but does not cover all of the browsers mentioned in that usage data. By default it just assumes that browsers that it doesn't track any data on are not supported. If you change this to All Tracked Users you then get 98.71%. The sum total of the browsers listed in the chart which have unknown support (these are different than the browsers being referred to in the setting above) is 1.27%. Worth it to note that likely there's some rounding going on here, as when you take 98.71% and add in that 1.27% you get 99.97999..% Pretty close though. So the real issue is indeed that those browsers show Unknown, when I think we can safely say they do in fact support the html element.
- derefr 3y agoGiven what the "not recognized as anything in particular" User-Agent strings in the request logs to our API SaaS look like, I have a feeling that 1.27% of "browsers" could very well actually be various kinds of special-purpose scrapers that have accidentally stumbled out of their domain of expertise. And as such, they may not necessarily know how to parse <html>. They could be JSON scrapers!
- rezonant 3y agoGood point! Would we call them browsers? Well, no, but they do speak HTTP and are bound to get picked up in the data. I suppose that would be the remaining 0.03% though, since the 1.27% is accounted for, if we trust the upstream browser usage data.
- maweki 3y agoI think the word "browser" usually doesn't appear in the w3c documents. It's a "user agent". And as long as the scraper works for a user, it fits nicely.
- mattl 3y agoThe original webpage doesn’t use the html element. http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
- justina20 3y ago[flagged]
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- galaxyLogic 3y agoWhat would it mean to NOT "support" <html> -element? Is putting <html> on a page supposed to somehow alter the way the page is presented?
- berkes 3y agoI think your question makes more sense if you broaden the idea of "browsers" a bit. wget? It barely "supports" html; it has a parser because it can follow links, contrary to e.g. curl, for which "HTML" is just a stream of bytes really. that tv-thing hanging in the underground or the bus rotating awkward advertisements, local weather and public transport info? It might very well use some minimal rendering engine that only knows barebones of HTML? this thing in the set-top-box on the TV that gets "broken" HTML from some server and presents the buttons and such? same there. I presume if you are liberal at what you consider "a browser" it makes sense that several will not support that element.
- galaxyLogic 3y agoAh I see now, they would just display the tag <html> on screen as is perhaps.