6 ms·

HTML5 Differences from HTML4 (2014)

54 points by aragonite 2y ago

notRobot 2y ago
Does anyone know where I can find old HTML4 templates that used to be all the rage back in the day? (Similar to the few that can be seen here https://www.bryantsmith.com/template/ https://www.bryantsmith.com/template/, or used to be provided on hpage.com)
- deaddodo 2y ago
  The terms you would be looking for are "PSD layouts", "sliced layouts", "website templates PSD", "table-based website templates", etc. Basically these are all websites that were fully designed in something like Photoshop or PaintShop Pro and then manually sliced into graphics that would then be finagled into a table layout manually (with zero borders). Usually with coord-based anchor links that were super finicky, especially if you wanted hover/click effects (usually achieved via HTML+JS versus CSS). Certain portions of the layout were designed to be repeatable for the content-based section of the website, so that would be a <TD> with a fixed width but non-fixed height and background-image with an x-repeat (again, usually in HTML tag properties versus CSS). Nowadays, it would probably be easier to find a graphic designer to just make you one to your specs and "slice"+table it yourself. It would certainly use better/more modern HTML/CSS.
  - nicpottier 2y ago
    I built an early site using those techniques in oh, 1996 I think? (stomped.com) Using zero border/padding tables was a clever way at the time of accomplishing a fancy graphics tab/menu without resorting to calling a CGI script.
    - deaddodo 2y ago
      Depends, does this look like your design? https://web.archive.org/web/19961121230158/http://www.stomped.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961121230158/http://www.stompe...
  - notRobot 2y ago
    Thank you for the search terms and context!
  - codetrotter 2y ago
    Also integral to this kind of design was the spacer gif. A 1x1 transparent gif that you’d give different width and height values to in the img tag, in order to create spacing in the page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_GIF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_GIF
    - supriyo-biswas 2y ago
      This very website uses them to this day[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif
  - beardedetim 2y ago
    Oh this brought back memories! Getting a PS file, using px for everything to "match the designs", random jQuery snippets to get a hamburger menu. Not a damn clue what I was doing but loving every minute of it.
- notRobot 2y ago
  Update: Found several here: https://www.oswd.org/ https://www.oswd.org/ http://www.openwebdesign.org/ http://www.openwebdesign.org/ http://www.opendesigns.org/ http://www.opendesigns.org/
deaddodo 2y ago
Whenever I see these old W3C docs mentioning old standards (MathML, in this case), it reminds me of how short-lived and little supported VRML was in browsers. I remember a scant few months were it would run in maybe Netscape? And then there were a couple years it was supported via Java Applets before being completely phased away. At least, in the web space; maybe it found purchase elsewhere.
- openthc 2y ago
  If you're looking for something similar still you may want to checkout https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/ -- it's JS library(s) and you load them, then use custom tags in HTML to create VR worlds. it's rad.
- oefrha 2y ago
  Assuming you’re talking about MathML, there’s nothing outdated or short-lived about it. Browser support is reasonably good nowadays[1], MathJax always supported it, KaTeX by default outputs MathML alongside HTML, etc. [1] https://caniuse.com/mathml https://caniuse.com/mathml
  - deaddodo 2y ago
    I didn't mean MathML specifically was unused, just that it reminded me of other niche/auxiliary standards that have been supported, many of which have been dropped.
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  I remember being like 15 and being excited about vrml. I think I knew one page with a working demo, and I used to tell people it was going to be the future.
- crizzlenizzle 2y ago
  I remember seeing VRML as a kid and I was mindblown. If I recall correctly, it ran in IE 4 with an add-on. I really thought, only a few more weeks and I can build games like Doom myself running in a browser. Well, with my assessment I was off over a decade lol. Last week I went to some meetup and met a young guy raving about every website is going to be VR in about two years. I didn’t even know about VRML.
bruce511 2y ago
I still come across people using the term HTML5 as if it's "a thing". For example "our system has been updated to HTML5". Whereas HTML5 spans more than a decade of continuous browser improvement and extension. It is an "era" or "mindset" not a "specification". HTML5 was a way of discarding the mindset of "versioning the web" - now browsers implement specific functionality as they choose. The Web Serial API might be in this "HTML5 browser" but not in that "HTML5 browser". The number is misleading in that sense. It implies a fixed moment in time. And it does that but only in a "before and after" sense.
- Brajeshwar 2y ago
  HTML5 was the last time it had a marketing version number. Henceforth, it was agreed to be just HTML. Now, it is like people saying Web 5, Industry 7, or something like that. It is no longer “the way” and is more of a cringe. Saying Web 2.0 was kind of like more of a big upgrade signifying a leap and a lot less about versioning. I’ve fond memories of the term “HTML5”. I sold the domain html5.in to an agent who was buying for Microsoft. The Microsoft part was discovered later after I sold it for single digit thousand dollars.
- userbinator 2y ago
  now browsers implement specific functionality as they choose. Make that "browser", as in singular, and replace "they" with "Google", the same ones who came up with the oxymoron "living standard".
  - bruce511 2y ago
    Yes and no. Yes Chrome (and Chrome derivatives) have a lot of market share. But Safari is important if only because of iDevices. And Firefox is still I the mix - single digit market share still adds up to a lot of users.
  - _the_inflator 2y ago
    I reject this notion wholeheartedly. Ian Hickson’s steadfast commitment to web standards and rejection of the xHTML bandwagon who did not understand the difference between catastrophic failure and silent failures and its implications accordingly build the foundation of everything we have now that is called web. Web Development back then was a total mess and he alone took matters in his hands for the better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hickson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hickson While others evolved into spec warriors, Hixi put users and usability first by looking beyond specs. He is an unsung hero whose contributions made the difference. He faced so much hostility, yet was the only one who maintained and understood every aspect of these specs. One after another he won open standard evangelists over. It is like Linux vs Windows and not Google vs the rest.
Inviz 2y ago
Anybody remembers <command>?
- assimpleaspossi 2y ago
  No. And it doesn't show in any HTML reference I have going back forever.
- 6510 2y ago
  No, what is it? Here it is A kind of button that acts like radio buttons? https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-author-20110809/the-command-element.html#:~:text=The%20command%20element%20represents%20a%20command%20that%20the,in%20the%20page%2C%20to%20define%20a%20keyboard%20shortcut https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-author-20110809/the-comm.... One more example here. https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-author-20110809/the-menu-element.html#context-menus https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-author-20110809/the-menu... I'm also unfamiliar with <menu>, it seems a very sensible idea? What went wrong with it?
  - hakfoo 2y ago
    They didn't implement it as anything resembling a system widget. What every web developer wanted from 1997 on was the common nav bar of the era: a set of dropdown menus that more or less behaved like the native dropdowns every other piece of software on the machine had. What we got was a <ul> with a funny name, so you had to at least toss a bunch of CSS at it to remotely resemble a "menu", and if it was on something like IE, also JavaScript to breathe it to life. I always believed if we had added a few more native-widget tags in the 1990s anything-goes era (a <menu> that looked the part, <td sortable="type">, maybe <richtext>, an <include> that was better than iframes), we could have had web based apps earlier, less Javascript to provide trivial functionality, and steered the web into a direction where the north star was the look, feel, and standards of native software. If quality web apps followed the OS Human Interface Guidelines and looked and active as native as possible, it would have created a completely different evolutionary environment. Would we end up prioritizing things like structured data because standard design practices were already displaying things in familiar structured widgets?
sylware 2y ago
I remember from that time those who where trying to do the "semantic web", some kind of complexity abomination... and in the end we got the current scripted gigantic and grotesque DOM abomination locked up/financed by big tech. Yep, I considered that was a loss/loss. I recall too how the major web browsers did everything to make xhtml dev a massive pain (that was clearly sabotage). In the end, you have to choose doing html "à la xml", or the html "à la sgml" (which is seriously ugly to parse). The only way to cleanup that big tech lock-down/mess: regulation on critical(utility) web sites with noscript/basic (x)html (like they mostly were a few years ago). Can we get a clean "better"? Well, if it is as simple (complexity _and_ size) to implement than html parsing, and as stable in time, yeah. As far as I know, it does not exist.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

54 points by aragonite 2y ago

Does anyone know where I can find old HTML4 templates that used to be all the rage back in the day? (Similar to the few that can be seen here https://www.bryantsmith.com/template/ https://www.bryantsmith.com/template/, or used to be provided on hpage.com)

deaddodo 2y ago
The terms you would be looking for are "PSD layouts", "sliced layouts", "website templates PSD", "table-based website templates", etc. Basically these are all websites that were fully designed in something like Photoshop or PaintShop Pro and then manually sliced into graphics that would then be finagled into a table layout manually (with zero borders). Usually with coord-based anchor links that were super finicky, especially if you wanted hover/click effects (usually achieved via HTML+JS versus CSS). Certain portions of the layout were designed to be repeatable for the content-based section of the website, so that would be a <TD> with a fixed width but non-fixed height and background-image with an x-repeat (again, usually in HTML tag properties versus CSS). Nowadays, it would probably be easier to find a graphic designer to just make you one to your specs and "slice"+table it yourself. It would certainly use better/more modern HTML/CSS.
- nicpottier 2y ago
  I built an early site using those techniques in oh, 1996 I think? (stomped.com) Using zero border/padding tables was a clever way at the time of accomplishing a fancy graphics tab/menu without resorting to calling a CGI script.
  - deaddodo 2y ago
    Depends, does this look like your design? https://web.archive.org/web/19961121230158/http://www.stomped.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961121230158/http://www.stompe...
- notRobot 2y ago
  Thank you for the search terms and context!
- codetrotter 2y ago
  Also integral to this kind of design was the spacer gif. A 1x1 transparent gif that you’d give different width and height values to in the img tag, in order to create spacing in the page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_GIF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_GIF
  - supriyo-biswas 2y ago
    This very website uses them to this day[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif
- beardedetim 2y ago
  Oh this brought back memories! Getting a PS file, using px for everything to "match the designs", random jQuery snippets to get a hamburger menu. Not a damn clue what I was doing but loving every minute of it.
notRobot 2y ago
Update: Found several here: https://www.oswd.org/ https://www.oswd.org/ http://www.openwebdesign.org/ http://www.openwebdesign.org/ http://www.opendesigns.org/ http://www.opendesigns.org/

deaddodo 2y ago

Whenever I see these old W3C docs mentioning old standards (MathML, in this case), it reminds me of how short-lived and little supported VRML was in browsers. I remember a scant few months were it would run in maybe Netscape? And then there were a couple years it was supported via Java Applets before being completely phased away. At least, in the web space; maybe it found purchase elsewhere.

openthc 2y ago
If you're looking for something similar still you may want to checkout https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/ -- it's JS library(s) and you load them, then use custom tags in HTML to create VR worlds. it's rad.
oefrha 2y ago
Assuming you’re talking about MathML, there’s nothing outdated or short-lived about it. Browser support is reasonably good nowadays[1], MathJax always supported it, KaTeX by default outputs MathML alongside HTML, etc. [1] https://caniuse.com/mathml https://caniuse.com/mathml
- deaddodo 2y ago
  I didn't mean MathML specifically was unused, just that it reminded me of other niche/auxiliary standards that have been supported, many of which have been dropped.
dec0dedab0de 2y ago
I remember being like 15 and being excited about vrml. I think I knew one page with a working demo, and I used to tell people it was going to be the future.
crizzlenizzle 2y ago
I remember seeing VRML as a kid and I was mindblown. If I recall correctly, it ran in IE 4 with an add-on. I really thought, only a few more weeks and I can build games like Doom myself running in a browser. Well, with my assessment I was off over a decade lol. Last week I went to some meetup and met a young guy raving about every website is going to be VR in about two years. I didn’t even know about VRML.

bruce511 2y ago

I still come across people using the term HTML5 as if it's "a thing". For example "our system has been updated to HTML5". Whereas HTML5 spans more than a decade of continuous browser improvement and extension. It is an "era" or "mindset" not a "specification". HTML5 was a way of discarding the mindset of "versioning the web" - now browsers implement specific functionality as they choose. The Web Serial API might be in this "HTML5 browser" but not in that "HTML5 browser". The number is misleading in that sense. It implies a fixed moment in time. And it does that but only in a "before and after" sense.

Brajeshwar 2y ago
HTML5 was the last time it had a marketing version number. Henceforth, it was agreed to be just HTML. Now, it is like people saying Web 5, Industry 7, or something like that. It is no longer “the way” and is more of a cringe. Saying Web 2.0 was kind of like more of a big upgrade signifying a leap and a lot less about versioning. I’ve fond memories of the term “HTML5”. I sold the domain html5.in to an agent who was buying for Microsoft. The Microsoft part was discovered later after I sold it for single digit thousand dollars.
userbinator 2y ago
now browsers implement specific functionality as they choose. Make that "browser", as in singular, and replace "they" with "Google", the same ones who came up with the oxymoron "living standard".
- bruce511 2y ago
  Yes and no. Yes Chrome (and Chrome derivatives) have a lot of market share. But Safari is important if only because of iDevices. And Firefox is still I the mix - single digit market share still adds up to a lot of users.
- _the_inflator 2y ago
  I reject this notion wholeheartedly. Ian Hickson’s steadfast commitment to web standards and rejection of the xHTML bandwagon who did not understand the difference between catastrophic failure and silent failures and its implications accordingly build the foundation of everything we have now that is called web. Web Development back then was a total mess and he alone took matters in his hands for the better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hickson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hickson While others evolved into spec warriors, Hixi put users and usability first by looking beyond specs. He is an unsung hero whose contributions made the difference. He faced so much hostility, yet was the only one who maintained and understood every aspect of these specs. One after another he won open standard evangelists over. It is like Linux vs Windows and not Google vs the rest.

Inviz 2y ago

Anybody remembers <command>?

assimpleaspossi 2y ago
No. And it doesn't show in any HTML reference I have going back forever.
6510 2y ago
No, what is it? Here it is A kind of button that acts like radio buttons? https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-author-20110809/the-command-element.html#:~:text=The%20command%20element%20represents%20a%20command%20that%20the,in%20the%20page%2C%20to%20define%20a%20keyboard%20shortcut https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-author-20110809/the-comm.... One more example here. https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-author-20110809/the-menu-element.html#context-menus https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-author-20110809/the-menu... I'm also unfamiliar with <menu>, it seems a very sensible idea? What went wrong with it?
- hakfoo 2y ago
  They didn't implement it as anything resembling a system widget. What every web developer wanted from 1997 on was the common nav bar of the era: a set of dropdown menus that more or less behaved like the native dropdowns every other piece of software on the machine had. What we got was a <ul> with a funny name, so you had to at least toss a bunch of CSS at it to remotely resemble a "menu", and if it was on something like IE, also JavaScript to breathe it to life. I always believed if we had added a few more native-widget tags in the 1990s anything-goes era (a <menu> that looked the part, <td sortable="type">, maybe <richtext>, an <include> that was better than iframes), we could have had web based apps earlier, less Javascript to provide trivial functionality, and steered the web into a direction where the north star was the look, feel, and standards of native software. If quality web apps followed the OS Human Interface Guidelines and looked and active as native as possible, it would have created a completely different evolutionary environment. Would we end up prioritizing things like structured data because standard design practices were already displaying things in familiar structured widgets?

sylware 2y ago

I remember from that time those who where trying to do the "semantic web", some kind of complexity abomination... and in the end we got the current scripted gigantic and grotesque DOM abomination locked up/financed by big tech. Yep, I considered that was a loss/loss. I recall too how the major web browsers did everything to make xhtml dev a massive pain (that was clearly sabotage). In the end, you have to choose doing html "à la xml", or the html "à la sgml" (which is seriously ugly to parse). The only way to cleanup that big tech lock-down/mess: regulation on critical(utility) web sites with noscript/basic (x)html (like they mostly were a few years ago). Can we get a clean "better"? Well, if it is as simple (complexity _and_ size) to implement than html parsing, and as stable in time, yeah. As far as I know, it does not exist.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]