Every HTML Element | Hacker News Reader

Every HTML Element

iamwillwang.com

501 pointswxw132 comments

For people interested in this sort of thing, I recently published a blog post looking at counts of HTML tags and their attribute values from a 2.9B page Common Crawl dataset. [1]

There's also a SQLite DB available to download of the top 1k tag+attr+value combinations. [2]

[1] https://webparsing.io/blog/hidden-in-html-parsing-page-layou... [2] https://webparsing.io/data/commoncrawl-2024-11-html-tags-att...

I think someone who works on Chrome did something a few years ago - though I can't remember exactly what they were trying to figure out.

I like this!

It's fun to compare it to "A blog post with every HTML element" [1][2], which gets at a (very!) similar thing but in a very different way. This post primary shows, and is a little more chaotic (meant positively!) whereas the other post is much more prose and explanation heavy (also good, but very different).

[1] https://www.patrickweaver.net/blog/a-blog-post-with-every-ht...

[2] HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37104742

Whoa! I'm a big fan of yours. You've really inspired me to think more creatively about the web/software. Thanks a ton, I'm glad this reached you.

Ah well hello! I'm not sure I've been recognized like that on the internet before. Thank you, that makes me very happy!

From your website it looks like we're in the same city; feel free to shoot me an email (mine is in my profile) if you'd like to grab coffee sometime :)

After looking at the source for this, I have a tangential question (feel free to answer even if you aren't the OP):

Whats the advantage of creating a separate `label` element before/after the input and using `for=` compared to simply wrapping the target input in the label element, like the code snippet below?

    <label>
      Your Name?
      <input />
    </label>

It seems to me that there is a lot less room for error when not using IDs, so I always wrap the input. My pages use a client-side webcomponent to inject fragments of HTML into the page (navbar, footer, etc), and using IDs almost always cause conflicts in the end, so I avoid ID attributes in all but a few very rare instances.

Note that the <input> tag does not need and does not use a closing slash and never has in any HTML standard: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/input.html#the-input-elemen...

It was required in the XHTML 1.0 specs, people carried it over I don’t know why but everyone stopped validating html so nobody cared.

Sure, but ... what about the question I posed?

Upside (of implicit labels) is that there's no more gap and you can avoid the exclusivity of `id` attributes (as you mention).

Downside is that screen readers may not handle the implicit label as well as one with explicit for= on it.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/forms/labels/

The <dialog> element says "This is a modal dialog displayed using just HTML." but that's a bit misleading because the dialog opens using JavaScript `document.getElementById('my-dialog').showModal()` in the onclick attribute of the relevant button.

Which is strange because you absolutely can open dialogs without javascript with the popover attribute

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Popover_API...

The Popover API only makes non-modal popups.

Yes, but in the article I posted:

> Popovers created using the Popover API are always non-modal. If you want to create a modal popover, a <dialog> element is the right way to go.

> You can turn a <dialog> element into a popover (<dialog popover> is perfectly valid) if you want to combine popover control with dialog semantics.

But it's still a non-modal dialog, which doesn't match the JavaScript functionality.

Apologies, for some reason I was convinced you could get a proper modal using the popover api but you're right, it's not a proper modal.

Funny, when reading this sentence, it felt like an LLM that was hallucinating and apologizes when told.

I wouldn’t expect an LLM to use a phrase like “for some reason I was convinced,”

Correct, it is only modal if JavaScript is used.

No, a <dialog> element will be displayed at page load if it has the "open" attribute. There is no need for JS.

The usual handling is with the JS API, but it's possible to handle it with CSS only. For instance, display the modal window only if a checkbox is checked.

No love for the <plaintext> tag? "The <plaintext> HTML element renders everything following the start tag as raw text, ignoring any following HTML. There is no closing tag, since everything after it is considered raw text." - it's my favorite obscure deprecated HTML tag.

What in the world was the intended use for that?

I'm terrified of opening a paren andforgetting to close it! How terrifying to find a tagged paren that cannot be closed!

"please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming" <plaintext>s

It was an easy way to use an existing plain-text document where HTML was expected.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-html-spec-0...

The PLAINTEXT element was replaced by the LISTING element (which was itself deprecated in HTML 3.2): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1866#section-5.5.2....

Fun fact: this is very close but slightly inaccurate. I used to think this is how it worked before scrutinizing a rule in the HTML tree-building specification.

The tag leads the parser to interpret everything following it as character data, but doesn’t impact rendering. In these cases, if there are active formatting elements that would normally be reconstructed, they will after the PLAINTEXT tag as well. It’s quite unexpected.

  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com"><b><i><u><s><plaintext>hi

In this example “hi” will render with every one of the preceding formats applied.

https://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/?%3Ca...

After I discovered this the note in the spec was updated to make it clearer.

  https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#:~:text=A start tag whose tag name is "plaintext"

same as <pre no?

It's not deprecated. It's obsolete and totally removed from the HTML standard since HTML4.

I like that you included the <ruby> tag! I really wish more pages would use them when rendering Chinese/Japanese characters in English text.

(your comment is very minimally informative, containing 1 bit of information: "there is something to learn about ruby". Searching "show source", "hidden gems" on OP's page marks the ruby spot)

and looking up the <ruby> tag:

https://interactive-examples.mdn.mozilla.net/pages/tabbed/ru...

The <ruby> HTML element represents small annotations that are rendered above, below, or next to base text, usually used for showing the pronunciation of East Asian characters. It can also be used for annotating other kinds of text, but this usage is less common.

The term ruby originated as a unit of measurement used by typesetters, representing the smallest size that text can be printed on newsprint while remaining legible.

I think it's very clear what he meant

Oh wow, TIL the HTML element for furigana is <ruby>

It's impressing that browser can display many levels of recursive iframe.

I've counted 18! The next one was blank.

Except this custom one I just invented that I implement in my custom browser

Too bad OP is not omniscient and capable of predicting your made up tags

> Too bad OP is not omniscient and capable of predicting your made up tags

I think a more accurate word here would be "prescient".

"Omniscient" means knowing everything, but I believe that "everything" doesn't include "everything now and in the future.

"Prescient" means knowing future events, i.e. "predicting"

(Emphasis mine)

That's obviously up to your definition, but omniscience as commonly understood as an attribute of the Christian God is also knowledge of future events (which is why it's usually argued that it conflicts with free will).

"The future" is part of "everything".

I agree with your reasoning (I'm not married to those definitions).

Looking at it again, I would still say that "prescient" would be more accurate, because:

    1. Omniscient is a superset that include prescient"
    2. Prescient is a narrower meaning than omniscient.

IOW, when describing a car, for example

    1. "Automobile" can be used to describe my wife's car
    2. "SUV" is a more accurate description.

So I'll still go with "prescient" being more accurate, in much the same way that "SUV is more accurate.

ive been demaking html elements by removing them from my custom browser so it evens out

But I didn't demark them so they are still elements.

Also Oxygen was mentioned, but not Argon

Raises the question, how far can you get using only custom elements and css?

It sometimes appears that the modern ideal is to not have an element "do" anything on it's own and depend on the css to define it's purpose. But we still have a lot of historical baggage we are carrying around.

> Raises the question, how far can you get using only custom elements and css?

I am so glad to see someone use "raises the question" correctly instead of using "begs the question" which does not mean "raise the question".

In response to your question - you'd be surprised if you have a few (3-4) webcomponents for the most common needs in front-end; things like client-side includes, etc.

In fact, with just client-side includes you get 50% of what a front-end framework gives you (ability to create reusable and standalone components).

Of course then you spend the time you won in ditching the framework to figure out ways to pierce the shadowroot so you can apply your global styles to the component :-(

Ask me how I know.

Relevant: https://htmlreference.io/

Even more relevant: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/semantics.html#semantics

The HTML Tags Memory Test [0] game refers to 114 tags. Your link got 113. I wonder what's missing?

[0]: https://codepen.io/plfstr/full/zYqQeRw

The memory test is missing some deprecated and non-conforming elements. The HTML spec doesn’t have a single comprehensive list either, so it can be a little tricky to define or name “all” of the elements.

For example, there are elements like nextid or isindex which don’t have element definitions but which appear in the parsing rules for legacy compatibility. These are necessary to avoid certain security issues, but the elements should not be used and in a sense don’t exist even though they are practically cemented into HTML forever.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/obsolete.html

As a browser game enthusiast I will have you tried for missing canvas

Canvas is stealthily hiding, as it has no content to display.

Where is the good old…

  <center>alignment with no CSS</center>

That's been obsolete for over 20 years: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/obsolete.html#non-conformin...

Bring back <blink> and <marquee>

You can revive <blink> with a tiny bit of css: https://www.quaxio.com/blink.html

You can't bring back something that never existed and both of those have never been part of any HTML standard. See my comment about this elsewhere.

I wonder if it would be possible to do this in a way that the page shows its own source code.

Could be tricky, because non-textual elements would probably have to be taken care of individually. For example a video would probably have to show a video of its own representation in code.

I think it would be better to do a split panel so you could see the source and the end result side by side. This would eliminate the need for somehow showing the video and the source in the same place. You could even include the shadow DOM trees for a full explanation of how the browser renders complex tags like video.

for certain elements, a quinesque approach might not be that useful, but source could be displayed juxtaposed to results. (to show numbered lists, do you want to display the ol tags before the numbers (thus using fake numbers) or do you let ol numbering tags tag the elements with numbers and then show the source inside that?)

btw it really drives me crazy that browser implementors think that when I copy/paste a numbered list, I somehow don't want the numbers.

This is very good: https://meiert.com/en/indices/html-elements/

First I've ever heard of hgroup.

Subheadings are one of those little things I've wondered about the proper semantics for a million times and always end up doing something slightly different on the fly.

PicoCSS uses them well, as an example: https://picocss.com/docs/typography#heading-group

hgroup is considered deprecated in HTML5 though, whatever that actually means.

It means if you use it then it’ll work fine but younger people will frown at you.

unlike the <blink> tag where younger people will just stare at you in a creepy extended unblinking gaze. it would be so much more satisfying if it still made them blink.

I absolutely need to write a polyfill for that.

   blink {
     animation: 1s ease infinite blink_effect;
   }

   @keyframes blink_effect {
     0% {
       opacity: 0;
     }
     50% {
       opacity: 1;
     }
     100% {
       opacity: 0;
     }
   }

Is it? I don't see any such warning or notice on https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/hg.... It's still listed here: https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110405/sections.html#t....

Perhaps it was re-added?

Hmmm you are right! This discussion explains that a bit https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15808330/hgroup-element-... looks like it was going to be removed, but WHATWG ended up keeping it.

> hgroup is considered deprecated in HTML5 though, whatever that actually means.

It was only deprecated in the W3C specification, not the WHATWG specification.

But now it's back in good standing: https://www.tpgi.com/subheadings-subtitles-alternative-title...

Worse, it has changed content rules and semantics in backward-incompatible ways. Meaning there are pages out there that used to be valid, but aren't anymore. And since HTML spills to EPub specs, I recall there were EPubs or EPub spec examples/test suites themselves having to change specifically, epubcheck being actually used for validation and hence directly noting this backward incompatibility.

In a nutshell, hgroup was originally criticized and rejected when W3C was still redacting HTML specs received from the loose group of browser devs and other people calling themselves "WHAT working group" because it paired headings of multiple ranks in a way that confused assistive technologies in browsers. But the first (and at the same time the last;) W3C HTML recommenndation created as unredacted WHAT WG spec snapshot under the W3C/WHATWG "memorandum of understanding" actually smuggled hgroup in. Then Steve Faulkner removed HTML outlining and the whole concept of sectioning roots that was part of Ian Hickson's vision of "HTML 5" for the longest time, but W3C never actually started a new recommendation process afterwards, and the charter for the HTML WG at W3C, Inc. has ended last year. See details at [1].

Arguably, with this change in 2023, we're now post-HTML5. But don't tell the people believing in a single "HTML 5 standard".

[1]: https://sgmljs.net/blog/blog2303.html

> First I've ever heard of hgroup.

<hgroup> was officially added to the HTML spec in 2018 [1]

It was deprecated in the W3C spec but not from the WHATWG spec, before they were merged.

[1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#the-hgroup-element

Lols you are offering to sell this for $1? https://iamwillwang.com/dollar/

haha, that's a bit of an inside joke (...for now?)

On mobile (Safari), the link to the article scrolls me down towards the bottom of the page by the iframe/red dot, making me think half the page was missing.

I'm on PC (Brave) and I experienced the same thing.

Thanks for the heads up! Misconfigured the source in <iframe>. Interesting behavior.

Websites these days don't seem to use 'Under construction' animated gifs, and I think they are probably worse for it.

The worse thing would be publishing an unfinished web site. That's why no one uses them anymore.

According to MDN [1] there is a <portal> element but hell if I know what it does.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/po...

While complexity of web tech means there's usually some hidden nuance, that description on MDN seems pretty clear: a non-interactive (other than for navigation) iframe, ie an <a> element that's a preview.

Scroll to the bottom and you'll see that it must be enabled by the user, is experimental, and not listed in any HTML specification.

Looks to me like it's intended as a link with preview, and part of the idea is that user agents could do a sort of animated transition morphing the preview into the content of the destination page.

It’s a non-interactive iframe.

(And experimental)

Most people insist on only using one element, which is the element of last resort, according to MDN. This is our friend, the <div>.

The only use case I have for <div> is in a details/summary where there is no CSS to select the contents of a <details> element, excluding the <summary>.

Does this mean I use <section> instead of <div>, as a 'direct replacement'? Nope. When using CSS grid, there is no need for <div> wrappers around everything.

I do like to use the full HTML element set, and, with scoped CSS, to style the elements, rather than have loads of divs with loads of class attributes. It all looks so much neater, particularly if the unstyled CSS looks rather good.

do you have an example?

Not to hand, for sharing here, but just try it with something like your CV, in neat HTML. Set yourself some rules to not use classes (for the lols, not out of ideological hatred) or divs (there is always a better element).

If you can't do it, there is probably more work to do with your document structure. Also try and always have a h1-h6 heading in your articles, sections, asides and even navs, at the top. Headings should not be in a sea of paragraphs, they should be at the top of a content sectioning element, nowhere else.

Out of idle curiosity, which better element am I supposed to use when I'm using flex layout to space out elements on my page?

(e.g., a toolbar with with left- and right- justified elements, among which is an expanding searchbox).

HTML elements are used to describe their content and not have anything to do with layout. While they often have common properties, these can be changed using CSS.

So use the element that best describes its content.

This is a great approach. Just to add to it, you can also use custom elements in lieu of classes, such as:

<my-product>...</my-product>

Any tag with a hyphen is considered a custom element, which is completely valid HTML -- even without defining the element in JS.

This gives you a more descriptive `div`, and then instead of classes like `product-primary`, you can use semantic attributes, like `<my-product primary size="large">`. In combination with CSS nesting, you can get some great looking HTML and CSS with minimal markup/visual noise and no build step.

you don't need a hyphen for a custom tag ; as far as i know the hyphen makes it an inline element while no hyphen makes it a block

You do need a hyphen for a custom-tag. The HTML specs have guaranteed never to create a tag with a hyphen, so it prevents collisions with any future tag additions.

Commercial work is different to pet projects, and, given that I have been told off for using <address> before now, I am wary of making up mu own elements.

I quite like styling the attributes, which gets me half-way to what you describe. In ecommerce we have all kinds of extra attributes for marking up products, although you can ditch that and just have a chunk of JSON+LD these days.

What happens is that I end up with great document structure and human readable/writable HTML and no CSS preprocessor things needed. However, sometimes I have things such as lots of sections containing lots of articles that contain lots of sections. I might take your tip to write '<top-category>' for those top-level sections.

When styling the elements, you tend to use the full range of elements, so a list could be a <dl>, <ol> or <ul> even if it eventually just gets styled as an <ul>. Really, semantics needs to come first, even if the presentation is just normal stuff.

I keep finding code examples where people are doing more than just using divs, which means that I am feeling more confident flexing the whole HTML element LEGO set.

> I do like to use the full HTML element set, and, with scoped CSS, to style the elements, rather than have loads of divs with loads of class attributes. It all looks so much neater, particularly if the unstyled CSS looks rather good.

From a discussion on HN a few days ago, I bookmarked this: https://github.com/dbohdan/classless-css

For the most common types of front-end work one needs to do, classless CSS is enough.

> The only use case I have for <div> is in a details/summary where there is no CSS to select the contents of a <details> element, excluding the <summary>.

div > *:not(summary)

This selects all the elements individually, so it behaves differently with attributes like margin or border.

I see. But then that wrapper is actually semantic and thus is eligible for the appropriate element.

>>Ah, now there's some breathing room, thanks to <br />.

That's XHTML which is XML. HTML does not use and does not need a closing slash and never has in any HTML specification.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/text-level-semantics.html#t...

I hate that XHTML went away. HTML parsing is terrible

The story of XHTML is instructive to the field of software design. There are plenty of good resources on the web if you search why did XHTML fail?

HTML parsing at least is deterministic and fully specified, whereas XHTML, as an XML, leaves a number of syntax errors up to the parser and undefined.

  Conforming software may detect and report an error and may recover from it.

While fatal errors should cause all parser to reject a document outright, this also leaves the end-user without any recovery of the information they care about. So XHTML leaves readers at a loss while failing to eliminating parsing ambiguity and undefined behavior.

Interestingly, it’s possible to encode an invalid DOM with XHTML while it’s impossible to do so in HTML. That means that XML/XHTML has given up the possibility of invalid syntax (by acting like it doesn’t exist) for the sake of inviting invalid semantics.

Interesting perspective, it makes me miss XHTML wayyy less. I was under the impression that XHTML (XML) was better specified and had less weirdness. I know HTML is now better specified but some of the things inherited from HTML 4 and before make no sense to me (optional closing times SOMETIMES, optional stuff everywhere).

No <details> / <summary>? [0]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...

It's at the bottom by the dialog!

I think there was at the bottom of the form? No? In the "click here" part.

Absolutely mind-boggling I didn't know progress and meter existed, I supposed progress has been made.

  <progress value="70" onmousemove="value=Math.random()*100" max="100"/>

It’d be cool to have a gutter on the left with the html tag that appears for that line

Don't know which tag you are talking about but gutters are CSS, not HTML. If you want a gutter, add one with CSS.

They're talking about the post itself and its structure

Weird that the URL links to the bottom of the page(?).

Sorry bout that, fixed! It was scrolling to the <iframe>.

Why was it scrolling to it though?

Cool! I got some "House of Leaves" vibes from it.

Learned and also refreshed my HTML programming language (I'll not debate on it) knowledge without any touch of CSS.

It would be useful if HTML content was not minified and have some comments added about each element besides them.

Very dismissive. Anyone not using <span> should take a second look. Of all the elements, this is the one to change font, size, color, etc. in any dynamic text without offsetting anything in your layout. Do you really want to throw your user's text inside a <div> inside your nice <div> layout? No.

Indeed, <span> is for inline elements what <div> is for block elements: a way to organize and apply styling. With raw html/js it can also be used for targeting text changes.

I know it's deprecated but I was expecting to see <xmp>.

It was so fun tossing that opening tag into a forum post and watching the whole forum disintegrate.

<xmp> was made obsolete in HTML3.0 or 2.0 which was around 1995, I think. In any case, it was removed from version 4.0.

Wait. No <script> element? An elephant went missing!

Look at the source.

great page, I discovered that my noscript/basic (x)html browser is doing more than I thought it did.

An index would be great

Disappointed to see <blink> or <marquee> merely mentioned but not used on that page, seemed like a serious omission.

Based on my tests just now, <blink> no longer blinks in today’s browsers but <marquee> still scrolls happily.

Both have never been part of any HTML specification. See my comment elsewhere here.

what this comment section is missing is "hey, here are other pages that do the same thing is a slighty different way" (there must be tons!? I would enjoy and learn from those type of comments so much I that I'd shout, "this is a motherfucking comment section!" https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

no marquee? c’mon

It’s a prank bro!

Blink

They are both there, in the table at the bottom

Both <marquee> and <blink> have never been part of any HTML specification since the beginning of time except, in marquee's case, it was included in the current spec for the whole purpose of marking it as obsolete.

...all of which have poor dx and ui. There isn't any philosophy or process behind "what should become a tag"

but hey, "use the platform"

The soundbite was great lol!

Nice Work!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com