6 ms·

Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts

245 points by patadune 1mo ago

LoganDark 1mo ago
Love the ruby tags on Chinese text!!
- rhdunn 1mo ago
  Ruby tags apply to other scripts as well like Japanese and Korean. See https://www.w3.org/TR/css-ruby-1/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-ruby-1/.
  - LoganDark 1mo ago
    Sure but I saw it used for Chinese in the article. Very cool!
- OuterVale 1mo ago
  I use them whenever I have an excuse!
- voidUpdate 1mo ago
  can they be applied to any text? might be useful if you have a hard to pronounce english word
  - robin_reala 1mo ago
    I’ve used them on Latin before.
  - Rendello 1mo ago
    Yes, <ruby> works with arbitrary text. There are quite a few styling options too: https://www.w3.org/International/articles/ruby/styling.en.html https://www.w3.org/International/articles/ruby/styling.en.ht...
Semaphor 1mo ago
Ohh, conditional comments. We had so many IE holdouts on our site, I think only around 2021 I removed the last IE specific fallbacks, and I think some conditional comments were a thing until 2020. I’m not sure when I removed a bunch of `msapplication-` fields, but probably after 2021 ;) I guess I can remove `apple-touch-` and `application-name` stuff next…
- icameron 1mo ago
  Conditional comments are still part of HTML email templates. Though soon will be dead I hope. Thanks "classic" Outlook!
- 1-more 1mo ago
  When I worked at agencies, it became clear to me that the audience for a company's website was not that company's customers or prospective partners or anything, it was that company's execs, who were often on IE two versions back from what was current. Thank goodness the earliest I ever had to support was 7.
cprecioso 1mo ago
I'd only add the Safari Pinned Tabs `meta` tag (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/pinnedTabs/pinnedTabs.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap...), which had you define a simple black and white SVG. This image would get used when a user pinned your tab in Safari, in color when active and black when inactive.
RobotToaster 1mo ago
GeoURLs seem like they would still be useful today.
- kijin 1mo ago
  I hope they support drones these days. ICBMs are too expensive and can't hit your coordinates as accurately.
  - chuckadams 1mo ago
    I would imagine that “close enough” is a thing with ICBMs.
- jszymborski 1mo ago
  It could be cool! Folks could use hCards rather than ICBM for that. https://microformats.org/wiki/h-card https://microformats.org/wiki/h-card
nness 1mo ago
Forever burnt into my mind is PNG alpha work-arounds in IE: filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='image.png');
- bbx 1mo ago
  Ha, fantastic line that one. Transparent pngs caused so much unnecessary trouble in IE6, it was very annoying, and limited our options as graphic designers.
- matsemann 1mo ago
  Hah, my thought as well, was a part of my standard page setup. And then using those transparent pngs to do rounded borders with 9 images nested within 9 divs! Edit: and down memory lane: the spacer.gif
  - kijin 1mo ago
    9 divs? That sounds pretty modern. I remember tables with 9 cells, with cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 to remove spaces between those cells.
    - aduty 1mo ago
      I remember both and I'm thankful that we were able to leave it behind.
  - DonnyV 1mo ago
    Using images for rounded corners.....ugh. I forgot all about that.
  - justsomehnguy 1mo ago
    I have some bad news for you: "inspect" the whitespace to the left of any comment here.
intrasight 1mo ago
Lots of mud at the base of the wall. I think it's a good sign. It'll be a bad sign if this list does't grow. I do bemoan the loss of the <?xml-stylesheet?> processing instruction and the JavaScript XSLTProcessor API.
CM30 1mo ago
Reminds me of how awkward HTML doctypes used to be. Nowadays it's very simple, but in the past? You had to refer to the URL of the doctype declaration on every page > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> This plus the X-UA-Compatible stuff mentioned in the article meant that for many people, the first few lines of code on a web page were something they probably copied from a tutorial or reference document every time, at least if they didn't have a CMS handy.
- TeMPOraL 1mo ago
  Like many, I ended up memorizing the pattern at some point, and then typing it from memory.
  - edoceo 1mo ago
    My editor had templates and snippets. Very lux in 2000.
- Telemakhos 1mo ago
  You only had to include a doctype if you needed to turn on strict XML rendering or do fun things with XSLT. It was great if you wanted to convert, say, TEI to something browsers could read. You were always, since the days of HTML 1.0, able to use just <html> to open your document without a doctype. It would be in tag-soup mode, but for most documents (rather than applications) that was fine. Not only do you not need a doctype, but you don't even need a <head> statement... browsers will generate one if you leave it out.
  - zdragnar 1mo ago
    Technically yes, but the struggle to keep IE out of quirks mode was real, and that meant a doctype and head and all the things.
  - Klonoar 1mo ago
    I am almost positive that there was one version of IE where having any space or newline before the DocType would trigger quirks mode.
netol 1mo ago
About Twitter Embeds: > These meta tags (and some other, less frequently used ones) were used on Twitter when generating link embeds. However, the documentation and card validator are no longer accessible (previously at https://dev.twitter.com/cards/getting-started https://dev.twitter.com/cards/getting-started and https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator respectively). X falls back to the widely respected Open Graph meta tags, making the Twitter-specific declarations largely useless. They should be removed in favour of Open Graph tags. Further, they should be removed because X is an awful site with poor moderation that is owned by a man who publicly performed a Nazi Sieg Heil salute and has directly contributed to the rise of fascism in the United States of America and globally, among other horrors. Ok but I believe `twitter:card` has no OG equivalent and still works?
- tosti 1mo ago
  Well, that escalated quickly. If my client wants Twitter tags, I'll write those Twitter tags. If my client wants dancing hamsters, I'll add those dancing hamsters. I don't care who Elon Musk is and what he did. I don't know the guy, but I do know my wife and family and they want food on the table.
  - Tepix 1mo ago
    Luckily, some people have enough money to be able to afford ethical inaction.
    - tosti 1mo ago
      Good for them.
      - DonHopkins 1mo ago
        It's so refreshing to see courageous people bravely standing their ground who don't believe Heiling Hitler on international TV and publically humiliating and abusing their trans daughter online is a bridge too far. It's so unfair to criticize anyone for doing something you'd do too if given the platform and opportunity. Once you disown and kick your own child out of the street instead of accepting them for who they are, you'll have lower grocery bills just like you voted for.
matsemann 1mo ago
I was also thinking about charsets, BOM (byte order marks) and other shenanigans that had to be correct in the top of the file for things to display as expected. At least it was a struggle for 13 year old me why sometimes æøå showed up completely broken, and sometimes not. Today it feels like a solved issue, all files are UTF-8 all the way and it just works. https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mark.en.html https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mar...
- skobes 1mo ago
  It is still important to declare UTF-8 either in <meta> or Content-Type header, otherwise it will usually default to Windows-1252. Yay compatibility!
  - tabwidth 1mo ago
    Even the meta version is picky about where it goes. The whole declaration has to fit inside the first 1024 bytes. Easy to break with a giant comment at the top.
lapcat 1mo ago
I would add this: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> All you need is initial-scale=1, not width=device-width, which is redundant. "You do not need to set every viewport property. If only a subset of the properties are set, then Safari on iOS infers the other values. For example, if you set the scale to 1.0, Safari assumes the width is device-width in portrait and device-height in landscape orientation." https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/UsingtheViewport/UsingtheViewport.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006509-SW26 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap... I've confirmed the behavior in testing.
- netol 1mo ago
  This may be Safari-specific? Google recommends setting both: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/best-practices/viewport https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/best-practices/...
  - OuterVale 1mo ago
    You don't need both, but you should have the width set. From that page: > A page fails the audit unless all of these conditions are met: > - The document's <head> contains a <meta name="viewport"> tag. > - The viewport meta tag contains a content attribute. > - The content attribute's value includes the text width=. I researched and tested this extensively the other day. `<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">` is all you need. https://vale.rocks/micros/20260902-1350 https://vale.rocks/micros/20260902-1350
    - lapcat 1mo ago
      > I researched and tested this extensively the other day. `<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">` is all you need. This is incorrect. Try adding an <img> that's wider than the device width. Then the whole page gets zoomed and the text unreadably small.
      - 1mo ago
forgotmypw17 1mo ago
Thank you so much for this amazing resource. One of my projects is a hyper-compatible framework that builds websites that span the compatibility spectrum from Netscape 3.x to today's browsers, and this is very helpful.
- OuterVale 1mo ago
  Oh, that is so great to hear. Glad to provide it! While writing I was very much thinking about it from the perspective of stripping things out, rather than incorporating legacy code for legacy contexts. Really interesting to think about that line of usage.
  - forgotmypw17 1mo ago
    I still generally avoid browser-specific hacks like these, aiming for lowest-common-denominator most-minimal HTML that still satisfies most browsers. However, now and then there's just no avoiding it. I am continuously in awe of the Web's decentralized and open nature that allows something like this to happen-- for one reasonably complex file/application to be compatible with 30 years of co-evolving client software written by many different developers and teams, much of it no longer supported.
- hefner1456 1mo ago
  Dont forget the Sega Dreamcast Planet Web:)
  - forgotmypw17 1mo ago
    Based on what I just looked up, PlanetWeb 1.0-2.0 and 3.0 support HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0, respectively, so it should work... I have not tested with this browser specifically, and it has no close relatives, but I've tested with enough mainstream and less mainstream browsers from that era to say this pretty confidently.
    - hefner1456 1mo ago
      there are cool some features that let you scroll text or have a custom logo on the vmu and other cool stuff. Here are some links I keep around if your curious. https://web.archive.org/web/20241003101005/https://www.angelfire.com/pa3/VAMPMAN/krypt_dcinfo.html https://web.archive.org/web/20241003101005/https://www.angel... https://web.archive.org/web/20031205061600/http://dreamcast.planetweb.com/community/homepages/dcdesign.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031205061600/http://dreamcast.... https://web.archive.org/web/20181029115530/https://dreamcastarena.com/how-to-create-dreamcast-website-friendly https://web.archive.org/web/20181029115530/https://dreamcast... https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16378 https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16378 http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/infinitedream_HTTP_USER_AGENT.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/infinitedream_HTTP_USER_AGENT.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/jeffma_useragent.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/jeffma_useragent.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/browsermatrix.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/browsermatrix.html https://dreamcast.wiki/Development https://dreamcast.wiki/Development https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=47902 https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=47902 https://web.archive.org/web/20250713015510/http://pc.psilocybindreams.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250713015510/http://pc.psilocy... https://web.archive.org/web/20000521015744/http://tools.planetweb.com/wmhelp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000521015744/http://tools.plan...
101008 1mo ago
This was not a HTML snippet by itself, but I remember early 2000s almost every website had three small icons somewhere: Set as homepage, Add to favorites, Contact (an envelope/email icon). I think I never used them (I didn't use Favorites back then, don't know why), but it was nice to see that they were available.
- XenoCyber0 1mo ago
  [dead]
rickcarlino 1mo ago
Server side image maps are a fun one also: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/what-were-server-side-image-maps.html https://rickcarlino.com/2021/what-were-server-side-image-map...
- BorisMelnik 1mo ago
  oh man <map> and <area> yes kids today just don't know the pain we went through. this is back when every single byte mattered and saving a few MB was the difference between a good user experience and a bad one. for those that never used this, you would do something like <img src="funnycats.jpg" usemap="#funnycats-map">  <map name="funnycats-map"> <shape="rect" coords="34,44,270,350" href="cats.html"> </map> most ppl used something like Dreamweaver but bad-asses would do their own coordinates.
  - gavinray 1mo ago
    My web dev experience began right before ES6, when browsers still did not do parallel asset loads and so spritesheets were common Why could you not have defined elements overlayed using high z index that were clickable, like invisible divs?
    - jgraham 1mo ago
      Server side image maps predate javascript. They were in early versions of Mosaic. Client side image maps and the script element were (AFAICT) both introduced in Netscape 2. Even when scripting was introduced, you didn't necessarily have the ability to move elements around freely on the page. I think (but I'm not certain) that it wasn't until Netscape 4 era that you had enough layout primitives to implement the multi-layer positioning approach to custom clickable areas.
      - gavinray 1mo ago
        With plain HTML you could have done this, though? <div class="image-map"> <img src="funnycats.jpg"> <a href="cats.html" style="position:absolute; background: transparent; left: 8.5%; top: 12.5%; width: 59%; height: 87%;" ></a> </div>
deanebarker 1mo ago
I thought PICS was a well-designed framework. I was disappointed when it didn't take off.
myfonj 1mo ago
There is similar collection in the joshbuchea/HEAD project, in DEPRECATED.md [0]. (It reminds me to finally gather and record remaining info about <meta name="keywords" content="..."> that's missing in both documents…) [0] https://github.com/joshbuchea/HEAD/blob/master/DEPRECATED.md https://github.com/joshbuchea/HEAD/blob/master/DEPRECATED.md
- OuterVale 1mo ago
  Keywords aren't (completely) dead (yet), unfortunately. https://bsky.app/profile/vale.rocks/post/3muylxyhg5222 https://bsky.app/profile/vale.rocks/post/3muylxyhg5222 Mention of usage by Yandex: https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/en/controlling-robot/metatags https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/en/controlling-robot/me...
  - myfonj 1mo ago
    Ha! Last year I did some preliminary research, and all contemporary sources I've found agreed that last public search engine stopped supporting meta keywords around 2018, IIUC. So good catch about Yandex, thanks for the headsup! Funny, how things get complicated :) This meta had very turbulent history in 2010s and refuses to die, apparently.
- dchest 1mo ago
  Why is meta keywords deprecated? I use them for my custom website search. I don't care that external search engines don't index it.
  - myfonj 1mo ago
    Well from the (incomplete, as turned out) info I gathered it turned out that it was never standardised to begin with (unlike meta description, for example), so it did not even have to be "deprecated". (Like it ever meant something in the real world…) I am definitely for any obsolete mischief, so it brings me joy hearing there is vernacular continuity! (As for external search engines,FWIR, in its heyday some search engines briefly regarded it quite respectfully, but eventually due to SEO spam they either started to ignore it, or took it as a negative signal, allegedly. But as pointed out in sibling comment, it still survives in Yandex, what is quite surprising plot twist for me.)
2d8a875f-39a2-4 1mo ago
oh god, so many hacks, so many hacks ::facepalm emoji::
jszymborski 1mo ago
I recall adding the page transitions to my website c. 2003ish with FrontPage! Also, an aside, but it's seldom these days that I see inspirational page design but this page is gorgeous.
derek_foreal 1mo ago
Unfortunately the comments are still used by email developers having to code for Outlook
hk__2 1mo ago
> The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) succeeded PICS but was also unsuccessful in its intentions At least they were quite inspired for the naming.
slipperybeluga 1mo ago
[dead]
werdnapk 1mo ago
Unexpected ending.
testycool 1mo ago
Love the UX and aesthetic of this site!
duskwuff 1mo ago
> Smart Tags was a system Microsoft introduced in Internet Explorer 6 which would automatically inject hyperlinks into pages. Smart Tags was present in some beta versions of MSIE6, but was removed before release. The MSSmartTagsPreventParsing meta tag never did anything useful - by the time its use was widespread, the feature it controlled had already been killed.
BorisMelnik 1mo ago
<blink>blink</blink>
samgranieri 1mo ago
Oh this is so much fun. Takes me back to the days I built out a scraper for a daily deal intelligence website. I literally saw daily deals that were microsoft word files saved as HTML. Ugh.
dannyobrien 1mo ago
I want to know and understand how/when we switched from all-caps tags -- <HTML><HEAD></HEAD> to lowercase. It was early on, but what prompted it?
- savolai 1mo ago
  Guess: https://www.madskristensen.net/blog/convert-html-tags-to-lower-case-for-xhtml-compliance/ https://www.madskristensen.net/blog/convert-html-tags-to-low...
  - dannyobrien 26d ago
    Noooooooooooo not XHTML
- Rendello 1mo ago
  This may or may not be relevant, but one thing about lower case generally: If you're doing string matching via Casefold or NFKC_Casefold [a], characters from both the needle and the haystack are converted to lowercase (with exceptions for algorithm stability reasons) before being compared. Why lower case and not upper case? Theoretically, the choice is arbitrary, but given the distribution of lower-case vs upper-case characters in most texts, you can use the fact that lower case occurs more often to optimize your algorithms by skipping the case conversion for most characters. a: https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/chapter-3/#G33992 https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/cha...
cadamsdotcom 29d ago
Love the note about X > Further, they should be removed because X is an awful site with poor moderation that is owned by a man who publicly performed a Nazi Sieg Heil salute and has directly contributed to the rise of fascism in the United States of America and globally, among other horrors. Heck yeah, a great flourish added to bring a truly fun read to a strong close.

245 points by patadune 1mo ago

LoganDark 1mo ago

Love the ruby tags on Chinese text!!

rhdunn 1mo ago
Ruby tags apply to other scripts as well like Japanese and Korean. See https://www.w3.org/TR/css-ruby-1/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-ruby-1/.
- LoganDark 1mo ago
  Sure but I saw it used for Chinese in the article. Very cool!
OuterVale 1mo ago
I use them whenever I have an excuse!
voidUpdate 1mo ago
can they be applied to any text? might be useful if you have a hard to pronounce english word
- robin_reala 1mo ago
  I’ve used them on Latin before.
- Rendello 1mo ago
  Yes, <ruby> works with arbitrary text. There are quite a few styling options too: https://www.w3.org/International/articles/ruby/styling.en.html https://www.w3.org/International/articles/ruby/styling.en.ht...

Semaphor 1mo ago

Ohh, conditional comments. We had so many IE holdouts on our site, I think only around 2021 I removed the last IE specific fallbacks, and I think some conditional comments were a thing until 2020. I’m not sure when I removed a bunch of `msapplication-` fields, but probably after 2021 ;) I guess I can remove `apple-touch-` and `application-name` stuff next…

icameron 1mo ago
Conditional comments are still part of HTML email templates. Though soon will be dead I hope. Thanks "classic" Outlook!
1-more 1mo ago
When I worked at agencies, it became clear to me that the audience for a company's website was not that company's customers or prospective partners or anything, it was that company's execs, who were often on IE two versions back from what was current. Thank goodness the earliest I ever had to support was 7.

cprecioso 1mo ago

I'd only add the Safari Pinned Tabs `meta` tag (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/pinnedTabs/pinnedTabs.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap...), which had you define a simple black and white SVG. This image would get used when a user pinned your tab in Safari, in color when active and black when inactive.

RobotToaster 1mo ago

GeoURLs seem like they would still be useful today.

kijin 1mo ago
I hope they support drones these days. ICBMs are too expensive and can't hit your coordinates as accurately.
- chuckadams 1mo ago
  I would imagine that “close enough” is a thing with ICBMs.
jszymborski 1mo ago
It could be cool! Folks could use hCards rather than ICBM for that. https://microformats.org/wiki/h-card https://microformats.org/wiki/h-card

nness 1mo ago

Forever burnt into my mind is PNG alpha work-arounds in IE: filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='image.png');

bbx 1mo ago
Ha, fantastic line that one. Transparent pngs caused so much unnecessary trouble in IE6, it was very annoying, and limited our options as graphic designers.
matsemann 1mo ago
Hah, my thought as well, was a part of my standard page setup. And then using those transparent pngs to do rounded borders with 9 images nested within 9 divs! Edit: and down memory lane: the spacer.gif
- kijin 1mo ago
  9 divs? That sounds pretty modern. I remember tables with 9 cells, with cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 to remove spaces between those cells.
  - aduty 1mo ago
    I remember both and I'm thankful that we were able to leave it behind.
- DonnyV 1mo ago
  Using images for rounded corners.....ugh. I forgot all about that.
- justsomehnguy 1mo ago
  I have some bad news for you: "inspect" the whitespace to the left of any comment here.

intrasight 1mo ago

Lots of mud at the base of the wall. I think it's a good sign. It'll be a bad sign if this list does't grow. I do bemoan the loss of the <?xml-stylesheet?> processing instruction and the JavaScript XSLTProcessor API.

CM30 1mo ago

Reminds me of how awkward HTML doctypes used to be. Nowadays it's very simple, but in the past? You had to refer to the URL of the doctype declaration on every page > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> This plus the X-UA-Compatible stuff mentioned in the article meant that for many people, the first few lines of code on a web page were something they probably copied from a tutorial or reference document every time, at least if they didn't have a CMS handy.

TeMPOraL 1mo ago
Like many, I ended up memorizing the pattern at some point, and then typing it from memory.
- edoceo 1mo ago
  My editor had templates and snippets. Very lux in 2000.
Telemakhos 1mo ago
You only had to include a doctype if you needed to turn on strict XML rendering or do fun things with XSLT. It was great if you wanted to convert, say, TEI to something browsers could read. You were always, since the days of HTML 1.0, able to use just <html> to open your document without a doctype. It would be in tag-soup mode, but for most documents (rather than applications) that was fine. Not only do you not need a doctype, but you don't even need a <head> statement... browsers will generate one if you leave it out.
- zdragnar 1mo ago
  Technically yes, but the struggle to keep IE out of quirks mode was real, and that meant a doctype and head and all the things.
- Klonoar 1mo ago
  I am almost positive that there was one version of IE where having any space or newline before the DocType would trigger quirks mode.

netol 1mo ago

About Twitter Embeds: > These meta tags (and some other, less frequently used ones) were used on Twitter when generating link embeds. However, the documentation and card validator are no longer accessible (previously at https://dev.twitter.com/cards/getting-started https://dev.twitter.com/cards/getting-started and https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator respectively). X falls back to the widely respected Open Graph meta tags, making the Twitter-specific declarations largely useless. They should be removed in favour of Open Graph tags. Further, they should be removed because X is an awful site with poor moderation that is owned by a man who publicly performed a Nazi Sieg Heil salute and has directly contributed to the rise of fascism in the United States of America and globally, among other horrors. Ok but I believe `twitter:card` has no OG equivalent and still works?

tosti 1mo ago
Well, that escalated quickly. If my client wants Twitter tags, I'll write those Twitter tags. If my client wants dancing hamsters, I'll add those dancing hamsters. I don't care who Elon Musk is and what he did. I don't know the guy, but I do know my wife and family and they want food on the table.
- Tepix 1mo ago
  Luckily, some people have enough money to be able to afford ethical inaction.
  - tosti 1mo ago
    Good for them.
    - DonHopkins 1mo ago
      It's so refreshing to see courageous people bravely standing their ground who don't believe Heiling Hitler on international TV and publically humiliating and abusing their trans daughter online is a bridge too far. It's so unfair to criticize anyone for doing something you'd do too if given the platform and opportunity. Once you disown and kick your own child out of the street instead of accepting them for who they are, you'll have lower grocery bills just like you voted for.

matsemann 1mo ago

I was also thinking about charsets, BOM (byte order marks) and other shenanigans that had to be correct in the top of the file for things to display as expected. At least it was a struggle for 13 year old me why sometimes æøå showed up completely broken, and sometimes not. Today it feels like a solved issue, all files are UTF-8 all the way and it just works. https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mark.en.html https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mar...

skobes 1mo ago
It is still important to declare UTF-8 either in <meta> or Content-Type header, otherwise it will usually default to Windows-1252. Yay compatibility!
- tabwidth 1mo ago
  Even the meta version is picky about where it goes. The whole declaration has to fit inside the first 1024 bytes. Easy to break with a giant comment at the top.

lapcat 1mo ago

I would add this: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> All you need is initial-scale=1, not width=device-width, which is redundant. "You do not need to set every viewport property. If only a subset of the properties are set, then Safari on iOS infers the other values. For example, if you set the scale to 1.0, Safari assumes the width is device-width in portrait and device-height in landscape orientation." https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/UsingtheViewport/UsingtheViewport.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006509-SW26 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap... I've confirmed the behavior in testing.

netol 1mo ago
This may be Safari-specific? Google recommends setting both: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/best-practices/viewport https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/best-practices/...
- OuterVale 1mo ago
  You don't need both, but you should have the width set. From that page: > A page fails the audit unless all of these conditions are met: > - The document's <head> contains a <meta name="viewport"> tag. > - The viewport meta tag contains a content attribute. > - The content attribute's value includes the text width=. I researched and tested this extensively the other day. `<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">` is all you need. https://vale.rocks/micros/20260902-1350 https://vale.rocks/micros/20260902-1350
  - lapcat 1mo ago
    > I researched and tested this extensively the other day. `<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">` is all you need. This is incorrect. Try adding an <img> that's wider than the device width. Then the whole page gets zoomed and the text unreadably small.
    - 1mo ago

forgotmypw17 1mo ago

Thank you so much for this amazing resource. One of my projects is a hyper-compatible framework that builds websites that span the compatibility spectrum from Netscape 3.x to today's browsers, and this is very helpful.

OuterVale 1mo ago
Oh, that is so great to hear. Glad to provide it! While writing I was very much thinking about it from the perspective of stripping things out, rather than incorporating legacy code for legacy contexts. Really interesting to think about that line of usage.
- forgotmypw17 1mo ago
  I still generally avoid browser-specific hacks like these, aiming for lowest-common-denominator most-minimal HTML that still satisfies most browsers. However, now and then there's just no avoiding it. I am continuously in awe of the Web's decentralized and open nature that allows something like this to happen-- for one reasonably complex file/application to be compatible with 30 years of co-evolving client software written by many different developers and teams, much of it no longer supported.
hefner1456 1mo ago
Dont forget the Sega Dreamcast Planet Web:)
- forgotmypw17 1mo ago
  Based on what I just looked up, PlanetWeb 1.0-2.0 and 3.0 support HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0, respectively, so it should work... I have not tested with this browser specifically, and it has no close relatives, but I've tested with enough mainstream and less mainstream browsers from that era to say this pretty confidently.
  - hefner1456 1mo ago
    there are cool some features that let you scroll text or have a custom logo on the vmu and other cool stuff. Here are some links I keep around if your curious. https://web.archive.org/web/20241003101005/https://www.angelfire.com/pa3/VAMPMAN/krypt_dcinfo.html https://web.archive.org/web/20241003101005/https://www.angel... https://web.archive.org/web/20031205061600/http://dreamcast.planetweb.com/community/homepages/dcdesign.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031205061600/http://dreamcast.... https://web.archive.org/web/20181029115530/https://dreamcastarena.com/how-to-create-dreamcast-website-friendly https://web.archive.org/web/20181029115530/https://dreamcast... https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16378 https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16378 http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/infinitedream_HTTP_USER_AGENT.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/infinitedream_HTTP_USER_AGENT.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/jeffma_useragent.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/jeffma_useragent.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/browsermatrix.html http://kamui.cool/zz_lab/browsermatrix.html https://dreamcast.wiki/Development https://dreamcast.wiki/Development https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=47902 https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=47902 https://web.archive.org/web/20250713015510/http://pc.psilocybindreams.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250713015510/http://pc.psilocy... https://web.archive.org/web/20000521015744/http://tools.planetweb.com/wmhelp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000521015744/http://tools.plan...

101008 1mo ago

This was not a HTML snippet by itself, but I remember early 2000s almost every website had three small icons somewhere: Set as homepage, Add to favorites, Contact (an envelope/email icon). I think I never used them (I didn't use Favorites back then, don't know why), but it was nice to see that they were available.

XenoCyber0 1mo ago
[dead]

rickcarlino 1mo ago

Server side image maps are a fun one also: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/what-were-server-side-image-maps.html https://rickcarlino.com/2021/what-were-server-side-image-map...

BorisMelnik 1mo ago
oh man <map> and <area> yes kids today just don't know the pain we went through. this is back when every single byte mattered and saving a few MB was the difference between a good user experience and a bad one. for those that never used this, you would do something like <img src="funnycats.jpg" usemap="#funnycats-map">  <map name="funnycats-map"> <shape="rect" coords="34,44,270,350" href="cats.html"> </map> most ppl used something like Dreamweaver but bad-asses would do their own coordinates.
- gavinray 1mo ago
  My web dev experience began right before ES6, when browsers still did not do parallel asset loads and so spritesheets were common Why could you not have defined elements overlayed using high z index that were clickable, like invisible divs?
  - jgraham 1mo ago
    Server side image maps predate javascript. They were in early versions of Mosaic. Client side image maps and the script element were (AFAICT) both introduced in Netscape 2. Even when scripting was introduced, you didn't necessarily have the ability to move elements around freely on the page. I think (but I'm not certain) that it wasn't until Netscape 4 era that you had enough layout primitives to implement the multi-layer positioning approach to custom clickable areas.
    - gavinray 1mo ago
      With plain HTML you could have done this, though? <div class="image-map"> <img src="funnycats.jpg"> <a href="cats.html" style="position:absolute; background: transparent; left: 8.5%; top: 12.5%; width: 59%; height: 87%;" ></a> </div>

deanebarker 1mo ago

I thought PICS was a well-designed framework. I was disappointed when it didn't take off.

myfonj 1mo ago

There is similar collection in the joshbuchea/HEAD project, in DEPRECATED.md [0]. (It reminds me to finally gather and record remaining info about <meta name="keywords" content="..."> that's missing in both documents…) [0] https://github.com/joshbuchea/HEAD/blob/master/DEPRECATED.md https://github.com/joshbuchea/HEAD/blob/master/DEPRECATED.md

OuterVale 1mo ago
Keywords aren't (completely) dead (yet), unfortunately. https://bsky.app/profile/vale.rocks/post/3muylxyhg5222 https://bsky.app/profile/vale.rocks/post/3muylxyhg5222 Mention of usage by Yandex: https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/en/controlling-robot/metatags https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/en/controlling-robot/me...
- myfonj 1mo ago
  Ha! Last year I did some preliminary research, and all contemporary sources I've found agreed that last public search engine stopped supporting meta keywords around 2018, IIUC. So good catch about Yandex, thanks for the headsup! Funny, how things get complicated :) This meta had very turbulent history in 2010s and refuses to die, apparently.
dchest 1mo ago
Why is meta keywords deprecated? I use them for my custom website search. I don't care that external search engines don't index it.
- myfonj 1mo ago
  Well from the (incomplete, as turned out) info I gathered it turned out that it was never standardised to begin with (unlike meta description, for example), so it did not even have to be "deprecated". (Like it ever meant something in the real world…) I am definitely for any obsolete mischief, so it brings me joy hearing there is vernacular continuity! (As for external search engines,FWIR, in its heyday some search engines briefly regarded it quite respectfully, but eventually due to SEO spam they either started to ignore it, or took it as a negative signal, allegedly. But as pointed out in sibling comment, it still survives in Yandex, what is quite surprising plot twist for me.)

2d8a875f-39a2-4 1mo ago

oh god, so many hacks, so many hacks ::facepalm emoji::

jszymborski 1mo ago

I recall adding the page transitions to my website c. 2003ish with FrontPage! Also, an aside, but it's seldom these days that I see inspirational page design but this page is gorgeous.

derek_foreal 1mo ago

Unfortunately the comments are still used by email developers having to code for Outlook

hk__2 1mo ago

> The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) succeeded PICS but was also unsuccessful in its intentions At least they were quite inspired for the naming.

slipperybeluga 1mo ago

[dead]

werdnapk 1mo ago

Unexpected ending.

testycool 1mo ago

Love the UX and aesthetic of this site!

duskwuff 1mo ago

> Smart Tags was a system Microsoft introduced in Internet Explorer 6 which would automatically inject hyperlinks into pages. Smart Tags was present in some beta versions of MSIE6, but was removed before release. The MSSmartTagsPreventParsing meta tag never did anything useful - by the time its use was widespread, the feature it controlled had already been killed.

BorisMelnik 1mo ago

<blink>blink</blink>

samgranieri 1mo ago

Oh this is so much fun. Takes me back to the days I built out a scraper for a daily deal intelligence website. I literally saw daily deals that were microsoft word files saved as HTML. Ugh.

dannyobrien 1mo ago

I want to know and understand how/when we switched from all-caps tags -- <HTML><HEAD></HEAD> to lowercase. It was early on, but what prompted it?

savolai 1mo ago
Guess: https://www.madskristensen.net/blog/convert-html-tags-to-lower-case-for-xhtml-compliance/ https://www.madskristensen.net/blog/convert-html-tags-to-low...
- dannyobrien 26d ago
  Noooooooooooo not XHTML
Rendello 1mo ago
This may or may not be relevant, but one thing about lower case generally: If you're doing string matching via Casefold or NFKC_Casefold [a], characters from both the needle and the haystack are converted to lowercase (with exceptions for algorithm stability reasons) before being compared. Why lower case and not upper case? Theoretically, the choice is arbitrary, but given the distribution of lower-case vs upper-case characters in most texts, you can use the fact that lower case occurs more often to optimize your algorithms by skipping the case conversion for most characters. a: https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/chapter-3/#G33992 https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/cha...

cadamsdotcom 29d ago

Love the note about X > Further, they should be removed because X is an awful site with poor moderation that is owned by a man who publicly performed a Nazi Sieg Heil salute and has directly contributed to the rise of fascism in the United States of America and globally, among other horrors. Heck yeah, a great flourish added to bring a truly fun read to a strong close.