I was expecting some questions about obscure old school HTML tags and what they ...

ars · on June 10, 2013

There are plenty of obscure modern HTML tags.

If anyway is bored I would love to see a graph of every possible HTML tag (old and new) plotted by frequency of actual use in the wild.

Some very rare - non outdated - ones:

  * colgroup
  * rowgroup
  * datalist
  * optgroup
  * fieldset
  * figure
  * figcaption
  * hgroup
  * keygen
  * legend
  * mark
  * ruby
  * details
  * summary

How many of these do you know? And how many have you ever used?

rurounijones · on June 10, 2013

I would kill for good ruby support in all browsers. As someone learning Japanese it would be a godsend when it comes to reading and learning kanji.

However we would also need to pretty specialised editors / automatic converters to write the ruby markup since it is so $&~!@#^ verbose.

I still find it ironic that the browser with the best (i.e. working) ruby support is Internet Explorer. (I am aware of some firefox plugins but...ech)

chrishepner · on June 10, 2013

I use fieldset and legend frequently. I believe Bootstrap uses these in their example forms, so I don't think these are nearly as obscure as the others.

optgroup is occasionally useful for demarcating groups within lists, but this need hasn't come up much in my experience.

I also use figure and hgroup, although more just for the sake of using HTML5 elements than anything else!

markdown · on June 10, 2013

hgroup has been dropped from the spec. You can/should stop using it :)

markdown · on June 10, 2013

hgroup has been dropped from the spec.

figcaption is actually quite popular now. Most newly-developed "html5" websites use it.

fieldset has always been quite common in my experience.