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Cool HTML elements nobody uses

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Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#101

Post by perilunar »

WorldMaker wrote: post #69
dspillett wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was largely iframes, though they are still in use for some things like certain methods of ad delivery. frames/framesets were often about partial updates, but mostly where script wasn't wanted so AJAX (once available) wasn't an option either.

Having lived through that era, Frames (and Framesets) were mostly killed by the proliferation of PHP on cheap hosts. A lot of Frames were used for building navigation elements without a lot of copy/pasting between HTML files (headers, footers, navigation bars, etc). The alternative to frames was either copy/pasting or ancient early static site generators. When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-s…

> When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-side inclusions.

You don't (and didn't) need PHP for server-side includes. Apache has had them forever. A lot of cheap hosting is LAMP stack, so has PHP available, but you don't need to use it to get SSI.

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#102

Post by perilunar »

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 ?

was often used for video and audio players as well as Flash, Shockwave, VRML and other plugins.

It's not needed anymore for audio or video — they have their own tags now — and plugins are dead.

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#103

Post by perilunar »

parminya wrote: post #70
jiggywiggy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Responsive reasons. Hardly ever can you do full absolute positioning.

I think they died well before responsive became a concern. Their heyday was really the time before not just CSS but even tables, at which time they were the only way to have links positioned in space rather than in flowing text. I don't think anyone liked imagemaps - it's just that there was no alternative. But their limitations were massive. Chiefly, in a period when dialup internet was becoming more common, an imag…

> before a user could interact with your website, they had to wait for a very slow download of a very large image that contained mostly text

Back then we also had the lowsrc attribute for images, so that large image should have been preceded by a much smaller 1-bit version.

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#104

Post by p_l »

perilunar wrote: post #101
WorldMaker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived through that era, Frames (and Framesets) were mostly killed by the proliferation of PHP on cheap hosts. A lot of Frames were used for building navigation elements without a lot of copy/pasting between HTML files (headers, footers, navigation bars, etc). The alternative to frames was either copy/pasting or ancient early static site generators. When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-s…

> When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-side inclusions. You don't (and didn't) need PHP for server-side includes. Apache has had them forever. A lot of cheap hosting is LAMP stack, so has PHP available, but you don't need to use it to get SSI. https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html

At least from my experience it was easier to get PHP than SSI - often if you were getting SSI, it was in conjunction with basic PHP support.

Mind you, I'm talking about cheapest hosting possible, where 20 MB was a "step up" option.

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#105

Post by mejutoco »

stefs wrote: post #65
inasmuch wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 publish…

i remember slicing images into rectangles which could be fit into a table. stole some portrait photograph of a woman, maxed out contrast, color reduction + dithering, then drew the eyes shut and make the open/close frames into gifs with different timings. the result: an image of a women who blinked both eyes independently, without the use of css and js. the outcome wasn't planned, it just happened - but it was so fun…

Choose prime numbers for the duration of those gifs and they will never close at the same time :)

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#106

Post by dspillett »

perilunar wrote: post #101
WorldMaker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived through that era, Frames (and Framesets) were mostly killed by the proliferation of PHP on cheap hosts. A lot of Frames were used for building navigation elements without a lot of copy/pasting between HTML files (headers, footers, navigation bars, etc). The alternative to frames was either copy/pasting or ancient early static site generators. When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-s…

> When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-side inclusions. You don't (and didn't) need PHP for server-side includes. Apache has had them forever. A lot of cheap hosting is LAMP stack, so has PHP available, but you don't need to use it to get SSI. https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html

From my experience SSI was not enabled on many hosts. If it was you usually had CGI or PHP too. Or maybe even mod_perl.

SSI was commonly enabled on university web servers IIRC, but not commercial hosts.

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#107

Post by WorldMaker »

perilunar wrote: post #101
WorldMaker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived through that era, Frames (and Framesets) were mostly killed by the proliferation of PHP on cheap hosts. A lot of Frames were used for building navigation elements without a lot of copy/pasting between HTML files (headers, footers, navigation bars, etc). The alternative to frames was either copy/pasting or ancient early static site generators. When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-s…

> When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-side inclusions. You don't (and didn't) need PHP for server-side includes. Apache has had them forever. A lot of cheap hosting is LAMP stack, so has PHP available, but you don't need to use it to get SSI. https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html

I did use SSI some. My impression at the time was that cheap hosts that rolled out Apache services and had SSI enabled also generally had PHP enabled and PHP was the "better" choice at that point because it was both more powerful and more portable given Apache's SSI was unique to it and not supported by other hosts (then or now).

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#108

Post by ttfkam »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #56
dylan604 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Ah, CSS expressions. So many memories of making IE6/7 polyfills in 2011. Without CSS expressions and behaviors, wonderful tools like CSS3PIE would never have been possible.

https://github.com/lojjic/PIE

As painful as IE6 and IE7 were in the late 2000s/early 2010s, they were surprisingly polyfillable (at a speed cost).

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#109

Post by ttfkam »

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...

Honestly, once I learned about client-side image maps, I don't think I ever even thought to touch the form-based ones ever again.

Re: Cool HTML elements nobody uses

#110

Post by cxr »

mejutoco wrote: post #105
stefs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i remember slicing images into rectangles which could be fit into a table. stole some portrait photograph of a woman, maxed out contrast, color reduction + dithering, then drew the eyes shut and make the open/close frames into gifs with different timings. the result: an image of a women who blinked both eyes independently, without the use of css and js. the outcome wasn't planned, it just happened - but it was so fun…

Choose prime numbers for the duration of those gifs and they will never close at the same time :)

Think this one through.

d₁ = 3, d₂ = 5

What happens at t = 15?

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