ObscureTags.com

December 22, 2006 8:33 PM

ObscureTags.com, a budding collection of obscure, deprecated, and outcast HTML tags. [via Projects]
posted by Spike (47 comments total)

Whoa. NewbieFilter.

They're not "tags", they're elements. It's like it's 1995 all over again.

The creator of this site seems puzzled by the existence of deprecated and/or accesibility-oriented elements. Nobody tell this guy about HTML 3.0. His poor little brain might explode.
posted by faster than a speeding bulette at 8:55 PM on December 22, 2006

Ahem,

This document has been superceded. Please see the HTML 3.2 Materials
posted by IronLizard at 8:58 PM on December 22, 2006

Someone tell MeFites that <small> is obscure.
posted by knave at 8:59 PM on December 22, 2006

Whoa. NewbieFilter.

They're not "tags", they're elements. It's like it's 1995 all over again.

Wouldn't that be OldieFilter, then?
posted by luftmensch at 9:02 PM on December 22, 2006

Choose your grade.


posted by niles at 9:02 PM on December 22, 2006

Woah. That actually did something when I hit post. Something about generating a key. Huh.
posted by niles at 9:03 PM on December 22, 2006

Whoa. NewbieFilter.

They're not "tags", they're elements. It's like it's 1995 all over again.

I assume you were addressing the creator of the site? I'm aware that they're elements, although "tag" is acceptable informally. I just said "tags" because that's what the site calls them.
posted by Spike at 9:10 PM on December 22, 2006

I've been coding HTML since domain names were free, and I didn't know a couple of these. Weird.
posted by Kickstart70 at 9:13 PM on December 22, 2006

Wow, for some of those (like the emphasis ones), I thought that is how you were supposed to do them.

In fact, the first HTML book I ever read emphasized using em instead i. The logic was that em was describing what you were trying to do (emphasize something) rather than prescribing an outcome. The browser would map that to whatever made sense for the device.

To be honest, I wish more sites took this view.

It also looked dimly on links that said "click here."
posted by MrGuilt at 9:20 PM on December 22, 2006

LET'S ^{USE THEM ALL AT ONCE!}

posted by sourwookie at 9:28 PM on December 22, 2006 [1 favorite]

isindex is pretty neat. And that is pretty damn obscure.

I love the idea of having an address tag, but then it being completely free-form inside. So it lets you easily pull the address out, but you still have to parse it by hand. Not a surprise that didn't catch on.
posted by smackfu at 9:28 PM on December 22, 2006

Well, fuck. It was simply amazing in preview. Trust me on that.
posted by sourwookie at 9:29 PM on December 22, 2006

Woah. That actually did something when I hit post. Something about generating a key. Huh.

This is very cool. And yet another thing for Matt to block when he gets back from vacation.
posted by smackfu at 9:29 PM on December 22, 2006

I assume everyone's familiar with the <small> tag already
posted by clevershark at 9:36 PM on December 22, 2006

I always thought it was a shame the address tag (or "element" for you Web2.0 guys out there) never caught on. If it were used it'd provide a quick method of compiling addresses from corporate sites, etc.

Blink, naturally, should go somewhere and die... I'm one of those unfortunates who is easily distracted by moving or blinking things. The blink tag makes it almost impossible for me to focus my attention on anything but the blinking text. Firefox supports the blasted thing and I can't find an option to turn it off. Only good thing that came out of MS was the decision not to implement blink in IE.
posted by sotonohito at 9:45 PM on December 22, 2006

The em/i distinction seems valid where i should be used for things like foreign loan words, which by convention are italicised. The intention isn't to emphasise, is it?
posted by Abiezer at 9:47 PM on December 22, 2006

Check

posted by oddman at 9:50 PM on December 22, 2006

aaaahhh...... Marquee works in Live Preview but not on the Blue itself, dang it.
posted by oddman at 9:51 PM on December 22, 2006

I was always a fan of the <nobr> tag because it lets you type and type and type and type without ever having to worry about that pesky carriage return or his evil little henchman the line feed.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:54 PM on December 22, 2006 [1 favorite]

can i now put sandwiches in metafilter once again?
posted by setanor at 9:58 PM on December 22, 2006

talkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalkingalking
posted by setanor at 9:59 PM on December 22, 2006

The em/i distinction seems valid where i should be used for things like foreign loan words, which by convention are italicised. The intention isn't to emphasise, is it?

Whoops, is that all a foreign loan word? We're not talking house styles here, we're talking portable HTML -- as in to different platforms which may not support characters that tilt, or even bold.

Anyway, the main issue I have with this is that an HTML element isn't obscure if it's been deliberately deprecated, or if it were proprietary and only implemented on (say) Cello. Most tags are obscure for the simple reason that their function has been subsumed by another element or, say, stylesheets. Others simply migrated into HTML from the parent markup languages like SGML and never really had much to do anyway (partly because HTML is a bastard child of a markup language and a hypertext system).

Ultimately this is a fairly short and finite list, and it's fairly easy to work through obsolesced specifications to find them.
posted by dhartung at 10:04 PM on December 22, 2006

dhartung - I meant I thought it was kept for instances when emphasis is rendered other than by italicising. If it's not supported, better to be left not slanted rather than emphasised incorrectly.
posted by Abiezer at 10:14 PM on December 22, 2006

The opt-group and label tags actually seem really cool and useful. I wonder if there's any reason I shouldn't use them.
posted by Afroblanco at 10:53 PM on December 22, 2006

sotonohito: Blink, naturally, should go somewhere and die...

How many mondern browsers still ship with blink enabled?
posted by SemiSophos at 10:54 PM on December 22, 2006

How many mondern browsers still ship with blink enabled?

Only the good ones.
posted by Spike at 11:06 PM on December 22, 2006 [1 favorite]

I <3 the bdo tag./bdo>
posted by treepour at 11:17 PM on December 22, 2006

er, messed that one up a bit, sorry.
posted by treepour at 11:18 PM on December 22, 2006

sotonhito: Type about:config in the URL field, put blink in the filter, and you'll see a value called blinkallowed or something similar. It's a boolean, set it to false. No more blink.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:34 PM on December 22, 2006

Afroblanco, no reason not to use those elements that I can see, except for uneven browser implementation of them. Using <label> can improve form usability and accessibility.
posted by bevedog at 12:34 AM on December 23, 2006

Firefox supports the blasted thing and I can't find an option to turn it off.

Type 'about:config' in the URL are, press return, and then search for 'blink'. The setting browser.blink_allowed, should be at or near the top. Double-click on true in the Value column and it should turn to false.

Reload the offensive page.
posted by AmberV at 4:22 AM on December 23, 2006

Small is not obsolete!
posted by afx237vi at 6:24 AM on December 23, 2006

My favorite obscure tags belong to the dictionary list (<dl><dt><dd>). I've seen sites with all kinds of awkward nested unordered list groupings to try to simulate it. And it's perfect for FAQs.

As for <label>, I use it all the time.
posted by ardgedee at 6:46 AM on December 23, 2006

[that about:config tip is great - thanks!]
posted by algreer at 6:47 AM on December 23, 2006

Using <label> can improve form usability and accessibility.

I love <label>, and I really wish that more sites would use it, especially for checkboxes and radio buttons, which can be a real pain to mouse over to using the trackpad on a laptop. It's much easier to be able to click anywhere along the text next to the checkbox/radio button and have it be selected.
posted by Godbert at 9:13 AM on December 23, 2006

This site made me surprisingly nostalgic. Like, actually longing for the early days of HTML, when finding out about these tags would have led me to hours of mad-scientist experimentation.
posted by medialyte at 9:15 AM on December 23, 2006

They're not "tags", they're elements. It's like it's 1995 all over again.

It's bad enough the web2.0 people ignored a perfectly good word "keywords" and then overloaded a technical term "tag" and now people are saying it's wrong to call HTML tags "tags"?

Don't be an idiot. "tag" is a perfectly reasonable word to use for HTML tags.
posted by delmoi at 9:49 AM on December 23, 2006

The term "tag" has a technical meaning. The only idiots are the ones who refuse to see that.

(The link, by the way, is from a document published in 1995.)
posted by faster than a speeding bulette at 10:03 AM on December 23, 2006

The LABEL element is great for blind people using the Web. I mean, really really great, like the difference between being able to use a form and not. If you're doing any online forms at all then please, do use it, it only takes a minute to learn how and is quick and easy to apply and it makes such a difference. (I develop a web browser for blind people...) There are bonus usability benefits for sighted people too, as Godbert mentions above. And girls (or boys) will like you more.
posted by alasdair at 11:24 AM on December 23, 2006

medialyte: "This site made me surprisingly nostalgic. Like, actually longing for the early days of HTML, when finding out about these tags would have led me to hours of mad-scientist experimentation."

Me too. I know I sound like a douche saying it, but the web was so much more fun then.
posted by loiseau at 11:37 AM on December 23, 2006

I agree that the underuse of the address tag is a shame. The guys doing Microformats really should pick up on the use of this tag. Their "hCards" could use these instead of the <div> soup they have going on.
posted by BioCSnerd at 1:21 PM on December 23, 2006

I guess I was the only one who read that as "Obscure Fags".

Boy, am I glad my vision insurance kicks in on Jan. 1.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 1:24 PM on December 23, 2006

faster than a speeding bulette writes "The term 'tag' has a technical meaning. The only idiots are the ones who refuse to see that."

So, for the pedantically 2.0 amongst you, let me see if I have this correctly: <p> is a tag, while P is an element, because it is a part of the HTML markup that is normally enclosed by tags? Because that's what ftasb's link makes it look like. In either case, is is really that annoying to see someone call <acronym> a tag? It is a tag, isn't it? It's the start tag for an acronym element, like the one I used to abbreviate ftasb's user name.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:56 PM on December 23, 2006

caution live frogs: ...let me see if I have this correctly...

Well, technically, a tag is the individual bracketed letter or letters, while an element is the whole syntax that makes up a displayable HTML item.

For example:
<a> is a tag, and
<a href="http://www.metafilter.com">MetaFilter</a> is an element.
posted by Spike at 2:16 PM on December 23, 2006

More information on what I was just talking about.

And trust me, I'm far from tragically 2.0. In fact, I can't stand alot of the so-called "2.0 culture" (Say "blogosphere" around me. I dare you). I've only recently been able to tolerate some of the "2.0" sites for the useful services they provide, in spite of the eye-gouging kitschy design (being able to upload random daily-life pics directly from my cellphone to my Flickr stream for viewing by my girlfriend who is at college 600 miles away is absolutely wonderful, pretentious spelling be damned). These are just standards, not any 2.0 nonsense.
posted by Spike at 2:31 PM on December 23, 2006

Not so much "obscure tags" as "perfectly normal tags that this guy happens to think are unusual." Obsolete stuff like keygen, spacer and isindex, fine; language-specific elements like bdo and ruby, okay if you don't do i18n. The rest are pretty basic tags I'd expect any halfway-skilled web developer to know about.

Especially label. Everyone should be using label. It's not just for blind people; labeled checkboxes or radioboxes let you click the text instead of the checkbox; much easier to hit that way.
posted by ook at 3:12 PM on December 23, 2006

Like Label, I like the use of title in hyperlinks

Blah
posted by mattoxic at 3:49 PM on December 23, 2006