The HTML Elements Time Forgot
35 points by carlana
35 points by carlana
<plaintext>is a funny one. It does what it says on the tin – that is, tells the browser to interpret everything after it as plain text. Of course, this means that any potential closing tag is also interpreted as plain text and therefore not parsed by the browser. Once opened, you cannot close a<plaintext>. The rest of the file becomes plaintext for eternity and whatever comes after.
That's wonderfully cursed. I love it.
As for the bit about <spacer> and spacer gifs, worth mentioning that spacer-like approaches have come back into fashion somewhat in frontend webdev in the last few years, for better or worse.
spacer-like approaches have come back into fashion
In $DAYJOB we get the worst of both worlds. General components don't have margins, only specifically layout-related ones. However, those generally don't take arbitrary dimensions, but only a given subset (say either 0.5rem or 1rem). Which sounds great on paper, takes out the guesswork, right? Wrong, you still absolutely need to fit things together aesthetically, which requires really nasty overrides using React's style prop.
I think the spacer stuff can work. To me it feels like cutting the same problem in two different kinds of way, neither obviously better than the other.
So much of my early web app development was perl4 and <isindex>. Good times....
If you want a form to work with very old Mosaic, you're using <isindex>. It was even integrated into the chrome. I suspect the search box in modern browsers descended in some fashion from that.
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.
Oh NEXTID ... back in the days when everyone (well, okay, people in standards bodies who'd been around groups like the Text Encoding Initiative) expected web pages to have unique, persistent name anchors down to paragraph level (at least), sentence level (getting there) or even word level (galaxy mind enabled). What's more, you were expected to be able to deep-link into anyone's page who had them. Of course.
It was round about that time that I saw an entirely serious proposal that all web pages should encode text complete with soft hyphenation entities (­) embedded in words. Forget accessibility and editability, we have nice smooth right margins!