Comment by froobius
3 days 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?
3 days 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?
Most 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.
The 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
I think that was known by meindnoch and was a joke.
1 reply →
I'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.
Not sure if a joke but this is factually inaccurate.
Accurate to some substantial usage, whatever definitional inaccuracy or backronym action is in play.
Descriptivism usually reflects some reality no matter the intended prescriptives.
15 replies →
Man, I love it when I find a good <table>
https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-30-visidata/
What does SHTML stand for?
The classical answer is that the S stands for Server-Side-Incude (SSI). SSI source typically uses the extension .shtml. More info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
SPAN-HTML, obviously.
This is a legacy of old apache configurations, the common mime type configuration files used .html to send the straight file, and .shtml to turn on the server side processing instructions. Server side includes could be static files or executable scripts that generated text on STDOUT. If you were using a lot of server side includes, it was cleaner just to turn on server side parsing for the whole site.
It's short for SHiTML.
Please delete this comment. If you're being sarcastic, this is not obvious at all to people who don't know.
[dead]
Because a lot of web frontend developers are addicted to <div> soup and fancy CSS and JavaScript libraries.
It'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).
> It's also due to browser not doing anything useful with the additional tags,
It's clear that you are sighted and never use reader mode.
5 replies →
Yes, 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.
Maybe not the browser itself, but in combination with semantic CSS [1], it's incredibly useful.
[1] - eg https://picocss.com/
Not true. Using semantic HTML and relying on its implicit ARIA roles allows the browser to construct an accurate AOM tree (Accessibility Object Model) which makes it possible for screen readers and other human interface software to create TOCs and other landmark-based navigation.
2 replies →
We 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?
2 replies →
If you want a specific behavior for <time> then write a browser plugin which e.g. converts the <time> content to your local time.
But if you are a developer you should see value in <article> and <section> keeping your markup much much nicer which in turn should make your tests much easier to write.
Semantic tags were never widely used, even before the overuse of JavaScript.
Because 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.
For anybody wondering, there are 112 of them:
My 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.
Maybe 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
please elaborate, how is <output> a better example for only doing half of what a developer would want? what is missing?
> 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?
In 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.
People 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.
I 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.
Then you might as well use a single instance of the canvas tag.
Doesn't Flutter do exactly that?