

Rare HTML Tags - nreece
http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/10-rare-html-tags-you-really-should-know/

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treyp
please read the comments of this article before reading its content or
upvoting this anymore. it's grossly inaccurate. in particular, this comment
which mostly nails it. again, i'm not the author of this, just quoting Paul
Armstrong:

\----------------------------------------

It's most unfortunate that you mis-used half of the items in this post.

cite should be used when you're actually _citing_ something from a source,
like if you're using a blockquote or q element.

optgroup should contain a set of options, not be closed before the options.
Your "live demo" doesn't show any visual difference because of your improper
usage.

acronym is used for acronyms. Defining acronym, "a word formed from the
initial letters of the several words in the name"… The usage in your example
just hurts my brain.

According the HTML specs, address is used to denote the address of the page
creator: "The ADDRESS element may be used by authors to supply contact
information for a document or a major part of a document such as a form. This
element often appears at the beginning or end of a document." See:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.5.6>

Pretty sad that you didn't use labels in your fieldset example.

The abbr example is a better example of an acronym. abbr, or Abbreviation is a
"shortened form of a word" like ‘management' -> ‘mgmt'.

rel should be used to describe the relationship of the text to the current
tag. W3C says, "This attribute describes the relationship from the current
document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this
attribute is a space-separated list of link types."

wbr is not in any HTML spec. It is a non-standard tag that was added by
Netscape, and later dropped around Netscape 4 or 5.

I'm incredibly disappointed by the inaccuracies that you're giving people who
might not know better.

~~~
ftse
We were discussing a <wbr> found in one of our webpages only yesterday - there
were a few puzzled expressions as to what the heck it did! Apparently the
answer is remove it.

~~~
zepolen
Replace it with &shy;

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catch23
Another semi-useful one is <base>. Most probably have never seen it, but it's
an easy way to direct all your relative links to a separate server. One can
use it for simple load balancing.

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jdp
The only neat idea from the article was using rel="clickable" for doing inline
ajax editables, makes a lot more sense than adding a class. Everything else
was kind of fluff.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
It wasn't just fluff, it was actually misleading and wrong.

acronym should never be used - it is superseded by abbr, and only kept for
backward-compatibility reasons. If you _are_ going to use it, then it should
be used for tagging acronyms. "Twitter" is not an acronym for "Founded in
2006".

Where's dl/dt/dd? Where are the labels for the radio buttons?

Flagged.

~~~
derefr
I use <abbr> for parenthetical remarks (that is, these) when I write. Is that
acceptable usage? I would have rendered the line above, on my blog, as:

    
    
        I use &lt;abbr&gt; for <abbr title="these">parenthetical remarks</abbr> when I write.
    

Having found that well-written anchor text just flows as part of the body of a
document, the link itself becoming invisible if you were to reformat the text
to remove it, I tried the same thing with parentheticals. So far, I think it's
worked wonders for my writing. Anything I want to say that's orthogonal to the
main point, but still interesting, can still be there in a sort of "director's
cut" view, but instead of having all my extra clippings forced upon you, you
have to decide to look.

If that isn't proper, I hope there's an <aside> tag in some upcoming version
of HTML; it's at about the same "semantic" level as <q>.

~~~
sc
<aside> is in HTML5.

<abbr> would be incorrect for this usage. You could, perhaps, stretch the use
case of the "i" element (not "em"), though a simple span would probably be the
way to go.

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ivank
<keygen>

[http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-
whatwg.org/attachme...](http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-
whatwg.org/attachments/20080714/07ea5534/attachment.txt)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070826111420/http://wp.netscape...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070826111420/http://wp.netscape.com/eng/security/ca-
interface.html)

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fuzzmeister
Wow, <optgroup> could be very useful. Great way to prevent the dreaded
expanding wall of text.

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ciscoriordan
Another underutilized set is definition list tags. They work well when you
want to create a box with paired text and images. <dl> <dt>Term</dt>
<dd>Definition or description</dd> </dl>

~~~
noblethrasher
I use that one quite a bit. Especially when I think of data that occurs in
key/value pairs. The only problem is that I wish that the markup was
<dt><dd></dd><dt> so that I the key/value pairs were in their own 'box' that
could be styled more intuitively.

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cdibona
If you haven't seen hixie's web authoring statistics (collected over a billion
html docs) then you should. <http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html>

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radu_floricica
Upvoted for wbr. I kinda wished for something like this. I wonder if it
actually works in modern browsers.

~~~
nreece
Works in IE and FF. Buggy in Safari. Does not work in Opera. Ref:
<http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html>

~~~
tremendo
From the browser compatibility chart there, I find that &shy; would be better
for the purpose than <wbr> failing only for Firefox 2 which at this point
should be negligible.

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oomkiller
Seriously, how did <label> make this list?

~~~
graywh
Too many websites don't use it.

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indiejade
These are not really "rare" HTML tags. More like. . . common XML tags.

