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Cool HTML elements nobody uses

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Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#51

Post by inasmuch »

donatj wrote: post #7

I am old enough to remember development when image maps were still common for things like headers and big hero homepage navigation images. I'd like to add which acts like an img tag and submit button that submits the clicked X and Y essentially as two separate inputs Here's an MDN example showing X and Y position in GET string on click. - https://mdn.github.io/learning-area/html/forms/image-type-ex...

Image maps unlocked expression on the web for me when I was a kid. I enjoyed coding websites, but felt creatively limited by what I knew to be possible with simple HTML and CSS. When I realized I could turn any graphics I made into live web elements without having to fit adjacent pieces into a layout I could simulate with tables, I felt I could finally make a website that reflected my artistic self.

I think I published the last version of my personal website that I made with an image map in 2004 or so. I've been trying to think of a good use for one over the last couple years but haven't come up with anything yet.

The last really cool image map-based website I remember was Margot's Room by Emily Carroll [1]. Dunno if she coded it, but it's her comic.

[1] http://emcarroll.com/comics/margot/index.html

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#52

Post by cantSpellSober »

donatj wrote: post #7

I am old enough to remember development when image maps were still common for things like headers and big hero homepage navigation images. I'd like to add which acts like an img tag and submit button that submits the clicked X and Y essentially as two separate inputs Here's an MDN example showing X and Y position in GET string on click. - https://mdn.github.io/learning-area/html/forms/image-type-ex...

They still are, check out amazon dot com

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#53

Post by flkiwi »

donatj wrote: post #7

I am old enough to remember development when image maps were still common for things like headers and big hero homepage navigation images. I'd like to add which acts like an img tag and submit button that submits the clicked X and Y essentially as two separate inputs Here's an MDN example showing X and Y position in GET string on click. - https://mdn.github.io/learning-area/html/forms/image-type-ex...

I laughed (affectionately) when I saw image maps. That was a real 1997 moment.

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#54

Post by cantSpellSober »

statico wrote: post #36
franga2000 wrote: post #16

Having used all of these in the past, here's why this is the case: 1. meter/progress - default style looks dated, styling works different on different browsers, the color scale options are confusing 2. sup/sub & 7. abbr - these are only useful for page content (as opposed to site design), which is usually WYSIWYG or something like Markdown. Many editors/parsers don't support it, at least by default. 4. map/area - it'…

For some reason makes me anxious. Is there some memory of the Flash/ActionScript days, or maybe ActiveX or something, that causes me to frown at seeing a mention of ?

Probably, to me will always be "the thing SWFObject used for rendering a Flash container"

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#55

Post by cantSpellSober »

franga2000 wrote: post #16

Having used all of these in the past, here's why this is the case: 1. meter/progress - default style looks dated, styling works different on different browsers, the color scale options are confusing 2. sup/sub & 7. abbr - these are only useful for page content (as opposed to site design), which is usually WYSIWYG or something like Markdown. Many editors/parsers don't support it, at least by default. 4. map/area - it'…

Until it's easier to add bloated animations to details/summary the designers will never let us use em

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#56

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

dylan604 wrote: post #42
sebazzz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trip down memory lane: Internet Explorer didn’t quite interpret the standard correctly and sent the coordinates as floating point numbers. If you had this input[type=image] on a ASP.NET WebForms page, this then caused ASP.NET WebForms to crash, as it tried to interpret the postback arguments of the X/Y coordinates as integers. I think this was later fixed by patching Internet Explorer.

Trip down memory lane: Internet Explorer didn’t quite interpret the standard correctly. Full stop. Anything said after this is just using words for vanity ;-)

This was a fun one: https://jezenthomas.com/you-think-css-in-js-is-bad/

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#57

Post by statico »

derefr wrote: post #47
statico wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason makes me anxious. Is there some memory of the Flash/ActionScript days, or maybe ActiveX or something, that causes me to frown at seeing a mention of ?

is supposed to be for exposing modules from hosted runtimes into the host execution-context as, well, objects (in the OOP sense. Or the COM sense, I suppose.) The original use-case would have been something like: imagine you code a game physics engine in Java, and deploy it as a Java applet. You can embed that physics engine into a page as an — and then consume it as a local API using JavaScript embedded on the same…

Ah ha! It was Java applets that makes me dread seeing / tags again. Gotta support IE, you know. Netscape will crash anyway.

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#58

Post by the_third_wave »

RedShift1 wrote: post #37
superkuh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they went out of style because they weren't javascript. But many older websites still use them to create fast loading, universally supported, interactive data visualizations that JS would still struggle to match. One of my favorites is the dynamic space weather visualization from Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, https://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/latest_events/

What's interactive about that example?

It'll load detailed pages based on the location of the image you click. It might not be interactive in the modern CSS-animated way but it does provide interaction with what would otherwise be a static image.

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#60

Post by clairity »

franga2000 wrote: post #16

Having used all of these in the past, here's why this is the case: 1. meter/progress - default style looks dated, styling works different on different browsers, the color scale options are confusing 2. sup/sub & 7. abbr - these are only useful for page content (as opposed to site design), which is usually WYSIWYG or something like Markdown. Many editors/parsers don't support it, at least by default. 4. map/area - it'…

to keep track of all of these in my personal css framework, i made an entry in the base stylesheet for every html element, even including a couple deprecated but widely supported ones (i also keep a list of fully deprecated elements in comments), though not every element gets styled beyond the default.

meter/progress can be styled consistently, but it's tricky because of the browser inconsistencies you mention. it took a lot of playing around with weird vendor-prefixed pseudos to get these looking similar across platforms.

sub/sub/abbr just need to be normalized first - normalize.css is a good reference for this. abbr can be useful for providing short "aside" info on a word/phrase in a semantic way.

styling detail/summary is relatively easy and they're pretty useful for FAQs and the like. i see web designers experimenting with more and more these days.

map/area, i don't use, but have seen it used on experimental designs to neat effect. and object is as you said, hard to predict for styling.

ps - it looks like chrome (105) will finally support mathML along with firefox and safari, so perhaps that will impact sub/sup usage in the future.

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