
Ask Hacker News: What is the most undervalued web technology? (2me RSS) - rokhayakebe
What about you?
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wlievens
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.

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kajecounterhack
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.

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DanielBMarkham
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.

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slashcom
I'd say there are really only two reasons that have stopped widespread
adoption of PNG:

1\. The file sizes can be rather large (less of a problem these days)

2\. IE6 improperly displays PNG alpha (This is big one).

Even the "IE7" javascript hack (<http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/>) didn't really
catch on.

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

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tlrobinson
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.

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neilk
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.

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DarrenStuart
email for me.

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dfranke
XSL-FO.

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xt500
SIP

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imsteve
Python browser applets!

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rms
Facebook

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paulgb
I can't tell if that's sarcasm.

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rms
Would I have gotten modded up if I had said yes?

