4 ms·

Rare HTML Tags

58 points by nreece 18y ago

radu_floricica 18y ago
Upvoted for wbr. I kinda wished for something like this. I wonder if it actually works in modern browsers.
- bscofield 18y ago
 C'mon, any upvote for wbr should be more than equaled by downvotes for saying label is rare and/or obscure.
- nreece 18y ago
 Works in IE and FF. Buggy in Safari. Does not work in Opera. Ref: http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html
 - tremendo 18y ago
 From the browser compatibility chart there, I find that would be better for the purpose than failing only for Firefox 2 which at this point should be negligible.
- derefr 18y ago
 Don't use , use (soft hyphen). Actually renders with a hyphen attached, letting you know you're reading one broken word, and not just two odd ones (I'm sure this happens, but I can't think of a good example.)
- samueladam 18y ago
 There is also the "Zero Width Break" character You could inject it every x characters in very long words when parsing user input. It is used in Thai where word breaks are not visible and line breaks are only allowed at word breaks.
- Hexstream 18y ago
 wbr is not part of any standard.
jdp 18y ago
The only neat idea from the article was using rel="clickable" for doing inline ajax editables, makes a lot more sense than adding a class. Everything else was kind of fluff.
- IsaacSchlueter 18y ago
 It wasn't just fluff, it was actually misleading and wrong. acronym should never be used - it is superseded by abbr, and only kept for backward-compatibility reasons. If you are going to use it, then it should be used for tagging acronyms. "Twitter" is not an acronym for "Founded in 2006". Where's dl/dt/dd? Where are the labels for the radio buttons? Flagged.
 - smoody 18y ago
 flagged? isn't that for spam and such? seems a bit harsh.
 - IsaacSchlueter 18y ago
 Let's say that there was an article saying that C++ is a great language because it supports templates, so you can easily customize your blog style with it. That's so far beyond wrong, I'd consider it spam. This is the HTML version of that error.
 - MrSomeone 18y ago
 I agree with IsaacSchlueter's comments, some of the examples/explanations given are just incorrect. <address> is supposed to be used only to signify the address of the author of the current page, not any address. The <cite> example doesn't really make any sense, as he doesn't actually have any quotation to cite. And Twitter is an acronym for "Founded in 2006"? What?
 - derefr 18y ago
 I use <abbr> for parenthetical remarks (that is, these) when I write. Is that acceptable usage? I would have rendered the line above, on my blog, as: I use <abbr> for <abbr title="these">parenthetical remarks</abbr> when I write. Having found that well-written anchor text just flows as part of the body of a document, the link itself becoming invisible if you were to reformat the text to remove it, I tried the same thing with parentheticals. So far, I think it's worked wonders for my writing. Anything I want to say that's orthogonal to the main point, but still interesting, can still be there in a sort of "director's cut" view, but instead of having all my extra clippings forced upon you, you have to decide to look. If that isn't proper, I hope there's an <aside> tag in some upcoming version of HTML; it's at about the same "semantic" level as <q>.
ivank 18y ago
<keygen> http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20080714/07ea5534/attachment.txt http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachme... http://web.archive.org/web/20070826111420/http://wp.netscape.com/eng/security/ca-interface.html http://web.archive.org/web/20070826111420/http://wp.netscape...
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
deleted 18y ago
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cdibona 18y ago
If you haven't seen hixie's web authoring statistics (collected over a billion html docs) then you should. http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html
fuzzmeister 18y ago
Wow, <optgroup> could be very useful. Great way to prevent the dreaded expanding wall of text.
catch23 18y ago
Another semi-useful one is <base>. Most probably have never seen it, but it's an easy way to direct all your relative links to a separate server. One can use it for simple load balancing.
oomkiller 18y ago
Seriously, how did <label> make this list?
- graywh 18y ago
 Too many websites don't use it.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
indiejade 18y ago
These are not really "rare" HTML tags. More like. . . common XML tags.
ciscoriordan 18y ago
Another underutilized set is definition list tags. They work well when you want to create a box with paired text and images. <dl> <dt>Term</dt> <dd>Definition or description</dd> </dl>
- noblethrasher 18y ago
 I use that one quite a bit. Especially when I think of data that occurs in key/value pairs. The only problem is that I wish that the markup was <dt><dd></dd><dt> so that I the key/value pairs were in their own 'box' that could be styled more intuitively.
treyp 18y ago
please read the comments of this article before reading its content or upvoting this anymore. it's grossly inaccurate. in particular, this comment which mostly nails it. again, i'm not the author of this, just quoting Paul Armstrong: ---------------------------------------- It's most unfortunate that you mis-used half of the items in this post. cite should be used when you're actually _citing_ something from a source, like if you're using a blockquote or q element. optgroup should contain a set of options, not be closed before the options. Your "live demo" doesn't show any visual difference because of your improper usage. acronym is used for acronyms. Defining acronym, "a word formed from the initial letters of the several words in the name"… The usage in your example just hurts my brain. According the HTML specs, address is used to denote the address of the page creator: "The ADDRESS element may be used by authors to supply contact information for a document or a major part of a document such as a form. This element often appears at the beginning or end of a document." See: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.5.6 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.5.6 Pretty sad that you didn't use labels in your fieldset example. The abbr example is a better example of an acronym. abbr, or Abbreviation is a "shortened form of a word" like ‘management' -> ‘mgmt'. rel should be used to describe the relationship of the text to the current tag. W3C says, "This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types." wbr is not in any HTML spec. It is a non-standard tag that was added by Netscape, and later dropped around Netscape 4 or 5. I'm incredibly disappointed by the inaccuracies that you're giving people who might not know better.
- ftse 18y ago
 We were discussing a found in one of our webpages only yesterday - there were a few puzzled expressions as to what the heck it did! Apparently the answer is remove it.
 - zepolen 18y ago
 Replace it with 
- Hexstream 18y ago

Rare HTML Tags

58 points by nreece 18y ago

radu_floricica 18y ago

Upvoted for wbr. I kinda wished for something like this. I wonder if it actually works in modern browsers.

bscofield 18y ago
C'mon, any upvote for wbr should be more than equaled by downvotes for saying label is rare and/or obscure.
nreece 18y ago
Works in IE and FF. Buggy in Safari. Does not work in Opera. Ref: http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html
- tremendo 18y ago
 From the browser compatibility chart there, I find that would be better for the purpose than failing only for Firefox 2 which at this point should be negligible.
derefr 18y ago
Don't use , use (soft hyphen). Actually renders with a hyphen attached, letting you know you're reading one broken word, and not just two odd ones (I'm sure this happens, but I can't think of a good example.)
samueladam 18y ago
There is also the "Zero Width Break" character  You could inject it every x characters in very long words when parsing user input. It is used in Thai where word breaks are not visible and line breaks are only allowed at word breaks.
Hexstream 18y ago
wbr is not part of any standard.

jdp 18y ago

The only neat idea from the article was using rel="clickable" for doing inline ajax editables, makes a lot more sense than adding a class. Everything else was kind of fluff.

IsaacSchlueter 18y ago
It wasn't just fluff, it was actually misleading and wrong. acronym should never be used - it is superseded by abbr, and only kept for backward-compatibility reasons. If you are going to use it, then it should be used for tagging acronyms. "Twitter" is not an acronym for "Founded in 2006". Where's dl/dt/dd? Where are the labels for the radio buttons? Flagged.
- smoody 18y ago
 flagged? isn't that for spam and such? seems a bit harsh.
 - IsaacSchlueter 18y ago
 Let's say that there was an article saying that C++ is a great language because it supports templates, so you can easily customize your blog style with it. That's so far beyond wrong, I'd consider it spam. This is the HTML version of that error.
- MrSomeone 18y ago
 I agree with IsaacSchlueter's comments, some of the examples/explanations given are just incorrect. <address> is supposed to be used only to signify the address of the author of the current page, not any address. The <cite> example doesn't really make any sense, as he doesn't actually have any quotation to cite. And Twitter is an acronym for "Founded in 2006"? What?
- derefr 18y ago
 I use <abbr> for parenthetical remarks (that is, these) when I write. Is that acceptable usage? I would have rendered the line above, on my blog, as: I use <abbr> for <abbr title="these">parenthetical remarks</abbr> when I write. Having found that well-written anchor text just flows as part of the body of a document, the link itself becoming invisible if you were to reformat the text to remove it, I tried the same thing with parentheticals. So far, I think it's worked wonders for my writing. Anything I want to say that's orthogonal to the main point, but still interesting, can still be there in a sort of "director's cut" view, but instead of having all my extra clippings forced upon you, you have to decide to look. If that isn't proper, I hope there's an <aside> tag in some upcoming version of HTML; it's at about the same "semantic" level as <q>.

ivank 18y ago

<keygen> http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20080714/07ea5534/attachment.txt http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachme... http://web.archive.org/web/20070826111420/http://wp.netscape.com/eng/security/ca-interface.html http://web.archive.org/web/20070826111420/http://wp.netscape...

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

cdibona 18y ago

If you haven't seen hixie's web authoring statistics (collected over a billion html docs) then you should. http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html

fuzzmeister 18y ago

Wow, <optgroup> could be very useful. Great way to prevent the dreaded expanding wall of text.

catch23 18y ago

Another semi-useful one is <base>. Most probably have never seen it, but it's an easy way to direct all your relative links to a separate server. One can use it for simple load balancing.

oomkiller 18y ago

Seriously, how did <label> make this list?

graywh 18y ago
Too many websites don't use it.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

indiejade 18y ago

These are not really "rare" HTML tags. More like. . . common XML tags.

ciscoriordan 18y ago

Another underutilized set is definition list tags. They work well when you want to create a box with paired text and images. <dl> <dt>Term</dt> <dd>Definition or description</dd> </dl>

noblethrasher 18y ago
I use that one quite a bit. Especially when I think of data that occurs in key/value pairs. The only problem is that I wish that the markup was <dt><dd></dd><dt> so that I the key/value pairs were in their own 'box' that could be styled more intuitively.

treyp 18y ago

please read the comments of this article before reading its content or upvoting this anymore. it's grossly inaccurate. in particular, this comment which mostly nails it. again, i'm not the author of this, just quoting Paul Armstrong: ---------------------------------------- It's most unfortunate that you mis-used half of the items in this post. cite should be used when you're actually _citing_ something from a source, like if you're using a blockquote or q element. optgroup should contain a set of options, not be closed before the options. Your "live demo" doesn't show any visual difference because of your improper usage. acronym is used for acronyms. Defining acronym, "a word formed from the initial letters of the several words in the name"… The usage in your example just hurts my brain. According the HTML specs, address is used to denote the address of the page creator: "The ADDRESS element may be used by authors to supply contact information for a document or a major part of a document such as a form. This element often appears at the beginning or end of a document." See: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.5.6 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.5.6 Pretty sad that you didn't use labels in your fieldset example. The abbr example is a better example of an acronym. abbr, or Abbreviation is a "shortened form of a word" like ‘management' -> ‘mgmt'. rel should be used to describe the relationship of the text to the current tag. W3C says, "This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types." wbr is not in any HTML spec. It is a non-standard tag that was added by Netscape, and later dropped around Netscape 4 or 5. I'm incredibly disappointed by the inaccuracies that you're giving people who might not know better.

ftse 18y ago
We were discussing a found in one of our webpages only yesterday - there were a few puzzled expressions as to what the heck it did! Apparently the answer is remove it.
- zepolen 18y ago
 Replace it with
Hexstream 18y ago