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So there's useful html tags from 2008 that no one uses or knows about... How can that be the case? Because there's just so many tags? Because people don't read
by froobius 1y ago
So there's useful html tags from 2008 that no one uses or knows about... How can that be the case? Because there's just so many tags? Because people don't read the docs? Because the benefits are not obvious?
- j45 1y agoIn some cases, because there was a period of time where it might not have been in HTML in all browsers, and javascript was used instead, and then HTML had it. Then no one checked, and the javascript train had already left the station.
- atoav 1y agoMy guess would be that most people just copy (mimic) what is already there. I sometimes work as a freelance web administrator and I can assure you 95% of people who create websites for a living have never read through a list of HTML tags, have only a slight idea of the semantic web and in the end they are more like people who cobble existing things together and are out of their depth pretty quickly. Not that this is problematic per se, everybodies milage may vary and we're all out there to learn. But if I told one of them about the output tag thry probably wouldn't even understand why that would be important.
- Timwi 1y agoPeople who already have a habit of solving a problem a specific way are generally unlikely to switch when a new solution appears unless it is considerably easier. If it's not immediately easier, it will feel easier to continue the ingrained habit.
- gregoriol 1y agoMaybe because most HTML tags are not well supported by browsers, because they are doing by themselves only half of what a developer would want, hard to style, hard to enhance the native behavior, ... most recently-added tags have those problems (ex: <progress>), this one from 2008 is an even better example
- em-bee 1y agoplease elaborate, how is <output> a better example for only doing half of what a developer would want? what is missing?
- ReptileMan 1y agoI mean with modern javascript/dom manipulation tools the only tag you really need is div. In before comments - not advocating for div only development, just that the nature of www moved from html with some js to well ... only js.
- 1718627440 1y agoThen you might as well use a single instance of the canvas tag.
- throw-the-towel 1y agoDoesn't Flutter do exactly that?
- vaylian 1y agoBecause a lot of web frontend developers are addicted to <div> soup and fancy CSS and JavaScript libraries.
- grumbel 1y agoIt's also due to browser not doing anything useful with the additional tags, if I use <article>, <section> or <div> doesn't make any difference, my browser doesn't use that to generate a TOC or let me open an <article> in a new Tab. Even the, in theory, incredible useful <time> tag seems to be completely invisible to my browser and many other potentialy useful tags don't exist in the first place (e.g. <unit> would be useful).
- 1718627440 1y agoYes, I think that is what browser should spend money on instead of inventing new syntax. Google Chrome still doesn't support alternate stylesheets. But I refuse to not use them simply because a rich company can't be bothered to implement decades old standards.
- kitd 1y agoMaybe not the browser itself, but in combination with semantic CSS [1], it's incredibly useful. [1] - eg https://picocss.com/ https://picocss.com/
- threatofrain 1y agoWe just don't have enough tags that we can really take advantage of on a semantic or programmatic level, and that has lead to other tags getting overloaded and thus losing meaning. Why don't we just have markup for a table of contents in 2025?
- fleebee 1y agoThat'd open a whole new can of worms. Browsers are already gargantuan pieces of software even with the relatively primitive tags we have today. We don't need to further argue with each other what the <toc> tag should look and behave like, deal with unforeseen edge cases and someone's special use cases which end up requiring them to implement the whole thing with <ol>s and <li>s anyway.
- Devasta 1y agoBecause no one cares about HTML except as a payload carrier for the real website: the JavaScript output from React/Tailwind/Typescript compilation. You have to remember, this is an industry that thinks having code without syntax errors was too unreasonable a requirement for XHTML, there is no reason to expect them to know anything beyond div and maybe a dozen other tags.
- meindnoch 1y agoMost sites today are not using HTML in the way it was originally envisioned. They use something called "DHTML" instead. The D stands for DIV, because people seldom use any other tag. E.g. in normal HTML you would use the TABLE, TR and TD tags to build a table. In modern DHTML (aka DIV-HTML) people build the table from fixed size DIVs, and calculate the column sizes via JavaScript.
- asjo 1y agoThe D in DHTML is usually short for "Dynamic". Around the time that abbreviation became fashionable using a lot of DIV elements also did, but that wasn't what the "D" stood for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML
- 1718627440 1y agoI think that was known by meindnoch and was a joke.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throw-the-towel 1y agoI'd say DHTML was more of a thing in the early 2000s when we were still using tables for layout. The divs came later, when the abbreviation had fallen out of fashion because all HTML kinda was dynamic by default.
- bapak 1y agoPlease delete this comment. If you're being sarcastic, this is not obvious at all to people who don't know.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- 1y ago
- 1718627440 1y agoFor anybody wondering, there are 112 of them: a abbr address area article aside audio b base bdi bdo blockquote body br button canvas caption cite code col colgroup data datalist dd del details dfn dialog div dl dt em embed fieldset figcaption figure footer form h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 head header hgroup hr html i iframe img input ins kbd label legend li link main map mark menu meta meter nav noscript object ol optgroup option output p picture pre progress q rp rt ruby s samp script search section select slot small source span strong style sub summary sup table tbody td template textarea tfoot th thead time title tr track u ul var video wbr
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago> Update 7 Oct 2025: Some screen readers have been found not to announce updates to the tag, so explicitly emphasising the role attribute might be worthwhile for now until support improves: <output role="status">. Maybe it's because like most things html/css related, it's a semi-broken implementation of a half-feature?