ObscureTags.com feed -- an xml document of strange and rarely used HTML tags

Can you hear me now? What about with bgsound?

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:30 -0800

Can you hear me now? Then you must be using IE, which still supports the BGSOUND tag for some reason. Of course, the best use of this feature is to play midi files.

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To the Infinity tag... and beyond!

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:30 -0800

According to wikipedia, "Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) is an application of XML for describing mathematical notations and capturing both its structure and content. It aims at integrating mathematical formulae into World Wide Web documents"

The upshot of this, is that you can actually write out formulae in valid xhtml, and they'll format themselves nicely for display on the browser. At this point, though, the support is limited only to Firefox, which actually provides a comprehensive torture test to see how well your browser supports it.

Examples require perfectly formed xhtml pages, which this one isn't, sadly... but you can find all kinds of info here: mathml in action

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Inline editing... devolved

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:27 -0800

This came up on Digg when someone was talking about going to any website and make it editable by typing the following into your browser:
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Just hit the link and rewrite this page. The effect should work in both IE and Firefox.

What makes this technological miracle possible? Why it's the contentEditable attribute -- not exactly a tag, but one of those oddball features that's sort of in the spec, sort of not. The ability to edit inline content appears to be a microsoft innovation that Mozilla did not want to follow.

In IE, you just bust out "contenteditable" block level attribute to impliment your editor. Try it out by typing your changes into the table itself below.

The Best Walther Matthau Movies (Edit and Change as Needed)

Serious	Funny
Taking of Pelham One Two Three	Charlie Varney
Cactus Flower	The Bad News Bears

Thanks to utcursch for a 'lil background on all this...

If you want to see a really goofy page editing demo using this feature in IE, go to www.xmlportfolio.com/temp/contentEditable.html. That d00d is even rockin' the execCommand javascript stuff in IE.

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Uncoverer of the terrible secret of the spacer tag

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Using a transparent gif to create empty space is lame because it's cross browser compatible. All the cool kids use the spacer tag.

Spacer appears to be a remnant from the old days of Netscape circa 1998. In 2006, it appears to only partially work in Firefox -- only the "block" type seems to do anything, the horizontal and vertical spacers don't seem to have any effect anymore.

I couldn't get spacer to do anything in IE. Presumably, it's unsupported in other browsers as well.

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Cute as a button tag

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

The button tag is the new input type="submit." You can do all kinds of weird stuff within button tags -- create tables, add images, mess with fonts. I guess that's normal stuff... it just seems a little odd to do it within the button markup itself.

Here are some examples:

Tables inside of buttons
What will they think of next?
You know you love it.

It would appear that the only thing you can't do within a button tag is:

Another button tag
An a tag
A select tag
An input tag.

In Firefox, everything looks nice and orderly. In IE 6, the rendering looks pretty scary.

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Keygen Challenges You...

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Maybe it's late and my brain is starting to fade out, but Mozilla's documentation for the keygen tag is giving me a headache:

"The KEYGEN tag facilitates the generation of key material and submission of the public key as part of an HTML form. This mechanism is designed for use in web-based certificate management systems. It displays a menu of key-size choices from which the user must choose one. Then, when the submit button is clicked, a key pair of the selected size is generated. The private key is encrypted and stored in the local key database. The public key and challenge string are DER encoded as PublicKeyAndChallenge and then digitally signed with the private key to produce a SignedPublicKeyAndChallenge. The SignedPublicKeyAndChallenge is base64 encoded, and the ASCII data is finally submitted to the server as the value of a name-value pair, where the name is specified by the NAME attribute of the KEYGEN tag."

Check out what it does:

It works in Firefox, anyway...

Has anyone actually used this? Can you provide an example? Drop by our forums if you can shed some light on how this might be appropriate on a page.

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If you can read this, you're too close

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

nested small tags make text smaller and smaller

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The word is broken...

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

According to quirksmode, the wbr tells the browser that it "may insert a line break here, if it wishes. If the browser does not think a line break necessary nothing happens."

blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah

Compatibility appears to be spotty -- IE 5.5+ and Mozilla seem to support it, but Opera and Safari didn't before.

They may now... who knows?

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Go big or stay home

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Nested big tags make text bigger and bigger

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Searching for something like isindex?

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

"You simply must look into the tag," writes Young Pete on our message board. "It is the granddaddy of all form fields. It puts a text box, a button, and a horizontal rule at the very top of your page. Any text sent has its spaces escaped with a "+" and is sent as a query string. Best of all, goes in !"

Here's an example: obscuretags.com/isindex.html

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If you can see this image, you must be using Firefox

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Only losers link to external images off their web pages.

Real men take advantage of the the data url. Basically, it lets you encode base64 data in the image's url itself. Instead of pointing an img src to a gif somewhere, you can embed your image data inline, right in the html on your page.

This only seems to work in Mozilla/Firefox, not IE. Support from other browsers is dubious.

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D to the l to the dd and dt

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Definition lists. A lot like the other lists... so much so that I betcha didn't even know they existed. It is pretty handy, though.

Stuff I like to drink: Soy milk; RC Cola; Coffee
Stuff I like to eat: Beef jerkey; Fruit rollups

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The Marquee Biz...

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Marquee will never go out of style. It's a shame that more people do not recognize its excellence.

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A diamond in the rough

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Since we did a Mozilla specific tag a moment ago, here's an oddball from the IE collection: ruby text.

It doesn't look like much in Firefox, but in Internet Explorer 5 or higher, it lets you annotate a line of text. Presumably, this one one of those infamous attempts of Microsoft to extend standard HTML to include proprietary tags that they have control over.

You can see how well that went. The effect itself is terrible.

This is some base text I wrote to illustrate the ruby tag. This is what the nested rt looks like...

Updated 2006-12-11
Several people wrote in with followup stuff on the ruby tag. Brian writes: "When I looked at the ruby tag in IE, I noticed that it is more than likely a tag used for writing Japanese furigana. Sometimes furigana is called, 'ruby text' -- I'm not sure why, but it is, so I'm reasonably sure that this is what the ruby tag was created for."

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Is that addressed to me?

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Another weird relic of bygone days. The address tag never really caught on. Not surprising, given that it doesn't do much.

(The semantic web/accessibility guys love this kind of thing though...)

Mayor McCheese
1234 Burger St.
McDonaldland, USA

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And I quote...

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

The q tag creates fancy quotations, but it doesn't work in IE.

Everybody pities the weak; jealousy you have to earn.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger

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Correcting mistakes with del and ins

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Deletions and insertions. This isn't CSS and it sure as heck ain't ~~strike~~. You can even define datetime and cite elements for both del and ins, even though modern browsers don't seem to do anything with 'em.

According to the President, ~~we should stay the course~~ we've never been stay the course.

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You can use bdo to reverse text direction

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

I have no idea why this is in the html spec. I'm sure there's a very good reason for the bdo tag to exist, though.

You can use bdo to reverse text direction. I have no idea why this is in the html spec. I'm sure there's a very good reason, though.

Now I know what you're thinking... bdo is for languages that go right to left instead of left to right. I guess that's true... but are right to left languages really input or stored left to right then reversed for display? (The answer may surprise you.)

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The old-skool way of doing emphasis.

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Back in the old days, before we really had that new fangled CSS, we had to do things the hard way. With crazy tags like b. Code is a useful alternative to pre, but I'm not sure I ever saw anyone use things like dfn... and it's not clear to me at all what kbd is supposed to be. Keyboard text?

Whatever.

Here's a list of some of the old emphasis-type tags:
     i
     b
     dfn
     code
     samp
     kbd
     var
     u

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The secret of acronym

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

STFU! I thought the only way to do this was with css 'n' stuff, but the acronym tag gives you rollover definitions with a tooltip. The html spec also includes support for abbreviations as well, but it's only supported by Firefox at this point.

IE users probably have no idea what I'm talking about... but in Firefox those tags give you a nice little underline. You can still mouse over STFU to see the tooltip, though.

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Das Blinkentag

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Everyone loves the blink tag!

The blink tag is so badass, it transcends the W3C's pathetic attempts to keep it down.

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Optgroup label=something

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

Another legitimately useful tag. Use the opt-group to break up your select lists.

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Applying a label tag

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:26 -0800

This one is actually handy. The label tag lets you extend out your radio boxes to include the labels next to 'em.

You'll see the effect if you click on the "yes" or "no" forms below.

(The actual words. By now, you probably know what clicking on a radio button does.)

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