A fascinating examination by Hixie of web technologies that may have technically been “better” than HTML, but still found themselves subsumed into the simpler, more straightforward, good ol’ hypertext markup language.
The follow-on comments are definitely worth a read too.
I absolutely love this in-depth history of the web, written in a snappy, snarky tone.
In the beginning, there was no CSS.
This was very bad.
Even if you—like me—lived through all this stuff, I guarantee there’ll still be something in here you didn’t know.
Web developers aren’t going to shed many tears for Flash, but as Bruce rightly points out, it led the way for many standards that followed. Flash was the kick up the arse that the web needed.
He also brings up this very important question:
I’m also nervous; one of the central tenets of HTML is to be backwards-compatible and not to break the web. It would be a huge loss if millions of Flash movies become unplayable. How can we preserve this part of our digital heritage?
This is true of the extinction of any format. Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to tackle this problem head on.
Here’s an interesting proposal to slightly amend the semantics of the small element so it could apply to the use-case that hgroup was trying to cover.
A glanceable one-stop-shop for how today’s browsers are dealing with today’s accessibility features. Then you can dive deeper into each one.
Written in 2001, this history of the web takes in CERN, hypertext, the ARPANET, SGML, and lots more.
Getting consistent browser behaviour for the placeholder attribute.
You can quote me on this markup pattern.
Something is happening.
Hammering out the issues around standardising responsive images.
Agreeing and disagreeing with Divya.