Ask Hacker News: What is the most undervalued web technology? (2me RSS)

Unless I misunderstand the question, I'd say Scalable Vector Graphics. A pretty decent format that's very badly supported in out-of-the-box browsers even though it's been in existance for several years. Consistent SVG support would allow a lot of server work to be shifted to the client.

Tables. How tedious is it to code beautiful looking layouts nowadays, with CSS and all? Sometimes, I dream of those messy, ugly, large, but easy-to-make-with-photoshop tables.

ahhhhhhhhhhh.

If it's just undervalued tech, and not "what's the most powerful tech that's obscure" I'd say it's the PNG file format. Lossless, greater color-depth, and alpha-blending: PNG would make the most difference on the most number of average people's web pages if they used it. Some of this other stuff is a lot more powerful, but it doesn't get my vote for undervalued because I think the audience is anybody who is creating a web page, not just tech guys.

I can think of RSS, Atom, RDF. But to me Javascript is the most undervalued. Plain old Javascript - the first mainstream lambda programming language.

JavaScript, at least up until recently.

It definitely got a bad reputation due to it's inappropriate name (trying to jump on the Java bandwagon, nothing to with Java whatsoever), copy/paste JavaScript snippets of the late 90s (giving us exciting features like blinking/scrolling text, fun cursors, etc), ginormous browser inconsistencies, and the use of prototypal inheritance instead of classical inheritance.

HTTP.

It's much more than just a means to push bits from server to client. It can be a very subtle way to get entire networks of computers to cooperate in wonderfully scalable and flexible ways.

email for me.

XSL-FO.

SIP

Python browser applets!

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