Forgotten HTML relics: from IE hacks to Baidu's page hijacking
Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts
The web is in constant flux, and so is its markup. This post catalogs obsolete HTML snippets that once served practical purposes—fighting browser wars, appeasing third-party integrations, or preventing unwanted modifications—but are now forgotten relics. It covers X-UA-Compatible tags, conditional comments for IE and Netscape, PICS labels, interpage transitions, frame busters, and meta tags for disabling Skype's toolbar, Baidu's transcoding, and more. Each snippet is a time capsule of web development's messy history.
For every line of the HTML specification itself that has changed since the language’s inception, there are many more bits of HTML that have seen what I’ll call ‘environmental’ changes.
- matsemann
I was also thinking about charsets, BOM (byte order marks) and other shenanigans that had to be correct in the top of the file for things to display as expected. At least it was a struggle for 13 year old me why sometimes æøå showed up completely broken, and sometimes not. Today it feels like a solved issue, all files are UTF-8 all the way and it just works.
https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mar...
- nness
Forever burnt into my mind is PNG alpha work-arounds in IE:
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='image.png');
- CM30
Reminds me of how awkward HTML doctypes used to be. Nowadays it's very simple, but in the past? You had to refer to the URL of the doctype declaration on every page
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
This plus the X-UA-Compatible stuff mentioned in the article meant that for many people, the first few lines of code on a web page were something they probably copied from a tutorial or reference document every time, at least if they didn't have a CMS handy.
- rickcarlino
Server side image maps are a fun one also: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/what-were-server-side-image-map...
- cprecioso
I'd only add the Safari Pinned Tabs `meta` tag (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap...), which had you define a simple black and white SVG. This image would get used when a user pinned your tab in Safari, in color when active and black when inactive.