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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

> I had heard of almost none of these HTML elements

I'm not disagreeing with the gist of your post, but come on, these elements have been around for ages. It's definitely on you to become acquainted with the basics before your HTML critic can be taken seriously ;)

The post links to MDN (arguably the most useful short reference) but there is of course also WHATWG's HTML spec or, if that's too voluminous, SGML DTD formal grammars for WHATWG HTML 2021 and 2023 snapshots [1], as well as for the older HTML 5.x series.

[1]: https://sgmljs.net/docs/html200129.html

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Most of them don't work properly and/or look terrible by default in all browsers.

So no-one uses them, so lots of people don't know about them.

What do you mean with "they don't work properly"? Could you give an example?

Datepicker was fundamentally broken in many ways in safari for a long time. And it still doesn't have the functionality that most apps need, so it's pretty pointless.

When I use the datalist element with a text input, Chrome shows an arrow on the right and the list drops down when you focus the input. Firefox, however, shows neither until you start typing, at which point it suggests just those items that match your input. So there's no way to see the full list of options.

I think Chrome's behavior is correct here, but the larger point is that precisely because these are native elements, when they don't work there's nothing you can do. So your only option is to reimplement them from scratch.

<abbr> has always been interesting to me. I've been aware of it for as long as I can remember, since it's been in all the tutorials I remember reading as a teen, and other docs as I got older. Unlike some other forgotten elements, it's one that's clearly very useful, and yet I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen it used in the real world (yet plenty of times where someone has reinvented it with JS)

Likewise, image maps. Remember messing about with those when I was young, but Wikipedia is the only place I've seen them used. To be fair, the UX isn't great, and I've often ended up navigating to an article when I was expecting to view the image page instead

Everybody was using imagemaps in the 90s because it was the only way to have multiple links over an image, something we wanted to do because without CSS we could not have a row or a column of buttons with fancy colors and fonts and placed where we wanted them to be. So nav bars were a large image with imagemap anchors placed over the buttons. Then we got CSS, tables (used for layout!), divs with positioning and eventually the features that web developers are using today.

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