Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts

patadune 232 points 82 comments September 08, 2026

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

LoganDark

Love the ruby tags on Chinese text!!

Semaphor

Ohh, conditional comments. We had so many IE holdouts on our site, I think only around 2021 I removed the last IE specific fallbacks, and I think some conditional comments were a thing until 2020. I’m not sure when I removed a bunch of `msapplication- ` fields, but probably after 2021 ;) I guess I can remove `apple-touch- ` and `application-name` stuff next…

cprecioso

I'd only add the Safari Pinned Tabs `meta` tag ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap... ), which had you define a simple black and white SVG. This image would get used when a user pinned your tab in Safari, in color when active and black when inactive.

RobotToaster

GeoURLs seem like they would still be useful today.

nness

Forever burnt into my mind is PNG alpha work-arounds in IE: filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='image.png');

intrasight

Lots of mud at the base of the wall. I think it's a good sign. It'll be a bad sign if this list does't grow. I do bemoan the loss of the <?xml-stylesheet?> processing instruction and the JavaScript XSLTProcessor API.

CM30

Reminds me of how awkward HTML doctypes used to be. Nowadays it's very simple, but in the past? You had to refer to the URL of the doctype declaration on every page > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" " http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd "> This plus the X-UA-Compatible stuff mentioned in the article meant that for many people, the first few lines of code on a web page were something they probably copied from a tutorial or reference document every time, at least if they didn't have a CMS handy.

netol

About Twitter Embeds: > These meta tags (and some other, less frequently used ones) were used on Twitter when generating link embeds. However, the documentation and card validator are no longer accessible (previously at https://dev.twitter.com/cards/getting-started and https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator respectively). X falls back to the widely respected Open Graph meta tags, making the Twitter-specific declarations largely useless. They should be removed in favour of Open Graph tags. Further, they should be removed because X is an awful site with poor moderation that is owned by a man who publicly performed a Nazi Sieg Heil salute and has directly contributed to the rise of fascism in the United States of America and globally, among other horrors. Ok but I believe `twitter:card` has no OG equivalent and still works?

matsemann

I was also thinking about charsets, BOM (byte order marks) and other shenanigans that had to be correct in the top of the file for things to display as expected. At least it was a struggle for 13 year old me why sometimes æøå showed up completely broken, and sometimes not. Today it feels like a solved issue, all files are UTF-8 all the way and it just works. https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mar...

lapcat

I would add this: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> All you need is initial-scale=1, not width=device-width, which is redundant. "You do not need to set every viewport property. If only a subset of the properties are set, then Safari on iOS infers the other values. For example, if you set the scale to 1.0, Safari assumes the width is device-width in portrait and device-height in landscape orientation." https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap... I've confirmed the behavior in testing.

forgotmypw17

Thank you so much for this amazing resource. One of my projects is a hyper-compatible framework that builds websites that span the compatibility spectrum from Netscape 3.x to today's browsers, and this is very helpful.

101008

This was not a HTML snippet by itself, but I remember early 2000s almost every website had three small icons somewhere: Set as homepage, Add to favorites, Contact (an envelope/email icon). I think I never used them (I didn't use Favorites back then, don't know why), but it was nice to see that they were available.

rickcarlino

Server side image maps are a fun one also: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/what-were-server-side-image-map...

deanebarker

I thought PICS was a well-designed framework. I was disappointed when it didn't take off.

myfonj

There is similar collection in the joshbuchea/HEAD project, in DEPRECATED.md [0]. (It reminds me to finally gather and record remaining info about <meta name="keywords" content="..."> that's missing in both documents…) [0] https://github.com/joshbuchea/HEAD/blob/master/DEPRECATED.md

2d8a875f-39a2-4

oh god, so many hacks, so many hacks ::facepalm emoji::

jszymborski

I recall adding the page transitions to my website c. 2003ish with FrontPage! Also, an aside, but it's seldom these days that I see inspirational page design but this page is gorgeous.

derek_foreal

Unfortunately the comments are still used by email developers having to code for Outlook

hk__2

> The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) succeeded PICS but was also unsuccessful in its intentions At least they were quite inspired for the naming.

werdnapk

Unexpected ending.

Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

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