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Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts
With ever-changing devices, browsers, operating systems, form factors, specifications, personal preferences, tooling, and corporate interests, the web is in a constant state of flux. As a result, so is the HTML we write. For every line of the HTML specification itself that has changed since the language’s inception, there are many more bits of HTML that have seen what I’ll call ‘environmental’ changes. Adaptations to differing browsers, extensions, integrations, and systems which we find HTML existing in.
This article doesn’t cover once-specced but now obsolete bits of HTML but instead looks at all the snippets that have wormed their way into websites as result of, or in combat against, third-party integrations, browser competition, vendor extensions, and platform-specific hacks. The bits of HTML that were included for reasons, and which have been forgotten for present irrelevance. The snippets that live on only in the markup of sites from bygone eras and in the minds of those who fought during the browser wars.
In an age where browsers changed quickly and version-specific behaviours weren’t unheard of, it was deemed necessary to signal compatibility with specific versions of browsers with the X-UA-Compatible meta tag. Here the content attribute reads IE=edge, meaning that the target is the highest supported document mode in Internet Explorer (IE).
As outlined in the documentation, there are other values than edge. One can also supply a value of 5 through 11 to correspond with the associated Internet Explorer version, or EmulateIE7 through EmulateIE11 to enter into that version’s mode, but only if a valid DOCTYPE is declared, otherwise falling back to quirks mode.
Before Chrome took over the market, Google released an Internet Explorer plugin called Google Chrome Frame. Installable in Internet Explorer versions 6 through 9, it rendered websites in Chrome’s modified WebKit engine rather than Internet Explorer’s Trident engine if they had the tag set.
requiresActiveX was used to prompt Internet Explorer 10 to switch to desktop mode if in Metro mode, which didn’t support plugins.
ICBM (an abbreviation of ‘intercontinental ballistic missile’) is hacker slang for one’s geographical location that dates back to Usenet days. The meta tag was used for identifying the location of a website’s subject and was referenced by the service GeoURL for plotting sites on the globe and helping people find sites of geographical proximity.
In an era where browsers changed regularly and the vicious browser wars were in full force, it was sometimes important to target a specific browser or version of one. Microsoft handled this in Internet Explorer with specially formatted comments as seen in the snippet. There were a number of operators that could be used to further refine the condition:
Netscape had its own way of handling conditional comments using JavaScript entities immediately following an opening comment tag. If evaluated to true, the comment would be included. If false, it’d just be a comment. Browsers other than Netscape would always treat it as just a comment.
Smart Tags was a system Microsoft introduced in Internet Explorer 6 which would automatically inject hyperlinks into pages.1 An example given by Microsoft was that ‘a Smart Tag might detect the names of major companies on the Web and tag them, allowing you to access stock quotes and company information.’. Site owners were outraged, and the MSSmartTagsPreventParsing meta tag was introduced to allow opting out. Microsoft later dropped it from Internet Explorer entirely.