Post by @Edent@mastodon.social

🆕 blog! “Esoteric HTML - ismap vs CSS”

The HTML specification is old and, while there is beauty in longevity, there's an inevitable build-up of boondoggles and baggage. Some elements like <marquee> have sadly been consigned to the dustbin of history - but there are still vestigial attributes just waiting to trip up the unwary.

If you're young, you may never have heard of Image Maps.…

#html5 #webdev #css

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Stubbs

@Stubbs@mastodon.me.uk 3 hr. ago

@Edent I gave a talk once called “You kids don’t know you’re born” about the history of the web, especially the early days and how we had marquee and blink tags … Unfortunately my 20 minute slot turned into an hour when I got to the birth of JavaScript and went on a rant urging these youngsters to make something better 🤣

Terence Eden

@Edent@mastodon.social 5 hr. ago

Half a dozen people have now told me that this post broke their RSS reader 😳

Terence Eden

@Edent@mastodon.social 2 hr. ago

As far as I can tell, this should be fine.

```
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[<p> Lorem ipsum <code><marquee></code>
```

It's of type HTML, so the contents *should* be encoded, but wrapped in CDATA to say that they aren't.

Happy to change my code if it is breaking stuff - and goodness knows Atom/RSS are moribund formats - but this doesn't feel like a *me* issue.

Feel free to politely tell me why I'm wrong 😸

Fazal Majid

@fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net 2 hr. ago

@Edent my feed reader is fine, unless I am missing something. I do see your marquee tag

ཀ།༨ཇ ་།་འ།སབཇའ

@chthonicionic@mastodon.online 7 hr. ago

@Edent some of these gotchas can be worked around by making it client side with a load of <area>s inside a <map> but <area> remains one of the few elements you can’t style AT ALL which is a bit sad.

Until about 5 years ago I was still using this stuff for one thing, but that’s gone over to webgl and a canvas now :(

AlisonW

@alisonw@hachyderm.io 11 hr. ago

@Edent
iir we didn't have css back then so it wasn't an issue

Terence Eden

@Edent@mastodon.social 11 hr. ago

@alisonw They were contemporaries.
Image Maps were part of HTML 3.2 - released early 1997.
CSS was late 1996.

dusoft

@dusoft@fosstodon.org 8 hr. ago

@Edent @alisonw Yes, but while image maps were available early and well supported, the CSS support was non-existent to flaky.

Mike Coats 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇪🇺🌍♻️

@mike@mikecoats.social 11 hr. ago

@Edent I loved image maps back in the day. I built a visual CYOA game in the style of Fallout 1&2’s maps and dialogue screens.

It was the pure HTML <map> and <area> version, though. I don’t think my web host at the time did much more than pre-provided cgi-bin Perl scripts.