The Lost Tags of HTML
http://www.the-pope.com/lostHTML.htm
I think the most truly seminal moment in the history of the internet and the World Wide Web occurred on that fateful day in 1990 when the decision-makers at CERN Institute in Switzerland accepted a proposal written by Tim Berners-Lee regarding a new networking scheme and commissioned him to begin working on this project, and provided him with a black, cube-shaped computer with a NeXT editor and other related software on it. Or perhaps it was that day not long after that Mr. Berners-Lee, using that computer, constructed the first working http server and web page featuring an inter-document hyperlink. Though hyperlinks had been mathematically speculated upon for decades, this was the first working instance of one capable of linking assets even across a computer network. Per his proposal, his concern was to provide a way to index and connect a large and growing number of academic papers being authored by the various scientists at the CERN Institute, and other scientists around the world with whom they were in communication through the small but growing internationally-spread computer network.
For myself, I find that the unique perspective of studying those tags and attributes which are depreciated, going away, or completely gone should prove to be an interesting approach to exploring the history and nature of HTML, and occasionally a few of some of the related technologies. Even so, I don't completely restrict my considerations to the lost tags, but also take this opportunity to explore some others of the more arcane and obscure features of HTML, the kind of stuff that receives little to no coverage, original material not available elsewhere. But this treatise is not meant merely to serve as a nostalgia trip down memory lane (though it may serve as that too). Rather, it is a chance to discuss the nature of technological change and progress, to see some of the academically clever ideas that fail to take hold in the marketplace, and conversely the ideas hastily implemented by the industry but with little or no standing with the academic community due to their misuse of what HTML was really meant to be about, to discuss backward-forward compatibility issues, and to understand some of the inner workings of HTML from a layman's perspective. Furthermore, support for these depreciated and obsolete tags and attributes continues to be, in many of the more contemporary browsers and user agents, done with grave inconsistencies. A new generation of browser writers has arisen who have no real understanding of what these underdocumented tags and attributes were, what they did, or how they were meant to be used.
February 17, 2015 - 3:17pm