Woooow i’m the first one unbelievable ,
nice tuts by the way some of those tags i see them for the first time in this tut.
does anyone knows if this site is going to post any .net tut ??

rel is not rearly used

Informative post, however wouldn’t it be more appropriate if the examples were in XHTML? I don’t think anyone that codes uppercase HTML without quotes around attributes is going to use any of these tags.

Very cool! Haven’t heard of half of these.

I thought fieldset is required for forms when using the xhtml strict doctype? It should be in your forms if you use xhtml.

Actually, I always use fieldset, legend and labels for my forms.
And another one cool (rare?) tag I love for forms is button instead of input type=”submit”. It’s so much easier to style with css and allows icons in the buttons. It validates, and I have yet to find problems with it. But w3c doesn’t recommend using it.

Didn’t know about optgroup and wbr though, thanks!

very very cool!

It’s most unfortunate that you mis-used half of the items in this post.

cite should be used when you’re actually _citing_ something from a source, like if you’re using a blockquote or q element.

optgroup should contain a set of options, not be closed before the options. Your “live demo” doesn’t show any visual difference because of your improper usage.

acronym is used for acronyms. Defining acronym, “a word formed from the initial letters of the several words in the name”… The usage in your example just hurts my brain.

According the HTML specs, address is used to denote the address of the page creator: “The ADDRESS element may be used by authors to supply contact information for a document or a major part of a document such as a form. This element often appears at the beginning or end of a document.” See: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.5.6

Pretty sad that you didn’t use labels in your fieldset example.

The abbr example is a better example of an acronym. abbr, or Abbreviation is a “shortened form of a word” like ‘management’ -> ‘mgmt’.

rel should be used to describe the relationship of the text to the current tag. W3C says, “This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.”

wbr is not in any HTML spec. It is a non-standard tag that was added by Netscape, and later dropped around Netscape 4 or 5.

I’m incredibly disappointed by the inaccuracies that you’re giving people who might not know better.

Yeah, fieldset is required and if you are not using it then you aren’t even making forms the right way If you haven’t used it, every site you have done should fail on validation, so hopefully this isn’t too rare…

chera meu cu

Some nice stuff in here, I especially liked the tags , and .

For our development course the “rel” is very useful as its important to keep the Javascript outside of the HTML and the rel is that bridge

I will bring these into our course content for Web Courses Bangkok.

Your use of the acronym tag is incorrect. It is not meant to define or further explain a group of words, but to provide the user with the ability to see the full name of an acronymic term, such as UNESCO, PETA or NCAA.

In fact, your example of the abbreviation tag should actually use the acronym tag, since NCAA is an acronym. Your description is correct, but the example is far from it.

Examples of abbreviations are:

ea (each)
tbsp (tablespoon)
km (kilometre)
abbr (abbreviation)

Oscar Godson: fieldset is not required for all doctypes, only XHTML Strict

was new to me, thanks!

Oscar I really like what you have going on with your site!! Kudos

Apparently opt group doesn’t work in chrome… browsing in it right now and had to open up firefox to see the effect. Although it seems like a pretty nice thing.

And the rel attribute is valid on all tags? Thats nice.

No, Aaron, it was just used incorrectly in the tutorial. The optgroup’s should wrap the options.

The example you have for the abbr tag is actually an acronym and should have been used with the acronym tag.

I am a little uneasy about using acronym or abbr for anything other than what they are meant for. I worry about screen readers saying that Twitter is an acronym for “Founded in 2006″

I don’t think you are using REL properly either as REL and REV are both attributes of A and LINK and have specific uses. It seems with the example that you give that you might as well just use extra class names.

All the rest of the tags are good to use. wbr and label are both great tags.

Good Contribution… Cool & neat. I need to have same thing for JS

Kinda disappointing that NetTuts, which usually has great quality posts, let this one slip with errors, such as:
* optgroup is badly used
* isn’t self closed ( is) and it isn’t standard. Using non-standard elements should be disencouraged.

Yes, we often use the tag, often in combination with the and tags. OK, serioiusly, the acronym tag is handy, and the label tag is pretty useful if you do a lot of form work

Before html got stripped, that said we use the wbr tag, often with the wtf and lol tags.

Nice Article.
I didn’t know that exists. And is required when using strict xhtml.

Nice!
Tks a lot…

Also note, it should probably be <wbr />.

nice ones

It could be cool if some of these tags were in WYSIWYG editors

Thanks for article!

Nice article. The alternatives to wbr aren’t showing up properly in browser though, you might want to edit that.

NCAA is an acronym not an abbreviation

The use of the acronym tag is wrong. Twitter has no acronym so it wouldn’t require the use of the acronym tag. An acronym is: “A word formed from the initial parts of a name, such as NATO, from North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or Commintern, from Communist International.”

Using “Founded in 2006″ is far from it!

? is this valid without a closing tag? I dont know this tag so maybe it could be like this

w3c.org says this in HTML 4.1 discussing acronym and abbr:

Western languages make extensive use of acronyms such as “GmbH”, “NATO”, and “F.B.I.”, as well as abbreviations like “M.”, “Inc.”, “et al.”, “etc.”.

It appears the w3c would’ve wrapped NCAA in an acronym tag rather than an abbr tag.

However the word acronym is not clearly defined; some people believe it’s not an acronym unless you can pronounce it like a word (NATO).

None of the above necesarily means that the suggestions you made for the usage of the tags aren’t good ideas. Sometimes the tags don’t have the best names for what they are best used for.

Hey Guys, just a couple things about the article:

1. The example was messed up by Wordpress. We’re working on it.

2. The and examples are, well… wrong I goofed on those. They should be fixed shortly to show correct examples of acronyms and abbreviations.

Thanks for reading, and keep up the great comments!

Er… ok and #2 in the above comment meant to say:

“2. The abbr and acronym examples are, well… wrong I goofed on those. They should be fixed shortly to show correct examples of acronyms and abbreviations.”

talking about rare, how about this one
text here
I think only several people know this

I already know all 9 tag except wbr, and fieldset, label and legend isnt rare I think

great my tag disapper
this is a rare tag that I was pointed

“marquee”

using to roll text or other element as long it was visible

it’s so cool..

thank u for your post..

Great post! Thanks for pulling some oldies but goodies out of the back of the tool shed.

In the -section at #7, the radio buttons doesn’t have the same formname. They have yes/no now, which makes both of them clickable.

Never knew about a couple of these. Don’t know about the default styling of ‘ins’. Surely it deceivingly looks like a link.

This article is enlightening to some, but I think it needed more proofreading before it was published. “rel” is also a very commonly used in microformats. I always use labels, and nearly always use fieldset, though for while I was incorrectly placing it on the outside of the form instead of the inside. That really messes things up when validating to XHTML strict.

What is rare about these again? Are they collectible limited edition code snippets?

Really nice list. I haven’t heard for some of this tags although I’ve been playing with websites for the last 5 years

Hope to see more informative articles like this one!

Quite a few of these aren’t rare at all. fieldset, legend, label are all pretty much mandatory, in some cases because of the doctype, in pretty much all cases because it makes your forms much better.

To be really honest, the only truly rare tag in this post would be the WBR tag. That one really is hardly ever used. The others are IMHO common. Possibly not as common as a P tag or a DIV tag but still… rather common.

The -tag is not used correctly. When marking up the meaning of the abbreviation SEO, you should use the appropriate -tag. Like this:

SEO

Woops. Looks like the form accepted my -tag in my previous comment.

It’s interesting how the address tag has changed to a different use due to misuse. Originally it wasn’t intended for displaying a location address, it was for addressing the author of a document. It looks like the W3C Schools now supports your use of the tag.

Looks like does the same as ­

In 6th u write about using label and in 7th when u can use it u don’t do it.

Label isn’t really that rare. In fact, it’s essential for blind users who use a screenreader. Without it, form elements have no context. If you’re not using it, you really shouldn’t be calling yourself a web developer.

Random.

Cracking article with some very useful tips.

Cheers

Yeah, I have never seen that someone used tag. Let’s remove it from usefull tags list

The ‘address’ tag is not for marking up general postal addresses. It is for supplying contact details of the author of the document. If you wish to semantically mark-up a postal address, use Microformats.

You guys have used on your own site.

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/build-a-top-panel-with-jquery/

and i thought i knew HTML

Nice Post….New to many of them

Reminds me of the SitePoint article I read the other day.

are these tags all valid in xtml-strict ?

had completely forgotten about the wbr tag, could have saved some headaches not lot ago!

Heard of them all, used maybe half.

I don’t make a habit of slagging off blog articles but this is poor and a great example of one or two good points diluted by filler to ‘make up the numbers’…

It seems as if the author run out of ideas and has had to resort to including an attribute (rel is not a tag) and ‘wbr’ as a tag i really should know? Come on… Readers might like to know that wbr isn’t and never was part of the HTML spec.

It is widely recognised that there is no need for both the ‘abbr’ and ‘acronym’ tag and as such, there is no acronym tag in the working spec for HTML5. Yet the author appears to be encouraging the use of both?

I was glad to see the ‘address’ tag until I saw the explanation to why one would want to use it. The explanation is misinformed, that was not the intended use.

Anyone who wants to gain a better, TRUE understanding of HTML elements should go to the W3C spec and read the guidelines.

How about the ruby tag? I didn’t know about that one until after I named my daughter Ruby

(Although it doesn’t really fall into the ‘you should know’ category)

Oh, and isn’t optgroup supposed to go around a set of options?

Grr, get the semantics right please!

A ‘tag’ is the word in angled brackets that comes at the beginning and end of an element. An ‘attribute’ is something added to the tag which further describes the element.

This post has mixed up the use of tag and attribute and doesn’t explain elements at all.

For beginners this will perpetuate the confusion and simply annoy anyone who understands the difference and how to properly use the elements described within.

Nice List.
I think you dropped some text in number 10 – something between ‘try’ and ‘or’?

“If you were wanting to achieve the same effect but without using the tag, you could also try ​ or should be noted that none of these tags have full support across all browsers.”

Decent write up and Ii picked a few things up, however I ought to point out that ‘address’ should only be used to ’specify such information as address, signature and authorship for the current document’ (from w3c html3 spec) it is not an address element for listing a number of offices in an organisation for example. For addresses you are much better off making use of the vcard microformat.

Also I would advise against using acronym at all as it is dropped from the proposed html5 and xhtml2 specs as it was deemed that abbr is more semantic.

A good use for the rel attribute is for microformats as well including xfn which helps you to specify yourself at different urls (e.g. homepage, twitter, flickr etc)

Do you really consider fieldset and label rare HTML tags? If you work often with forms you can’t not know them, they are a MUST

Interesting if not entirely useful. Some I use, some I don’t and some I never will.

Rather than use surely these days it’s better to make a vcard.

[code][/code]

Boy! For a site about web site building you sure make it difficult to post code in the comments!

OK. I was talking about the “address” tag.

Due to the amount of forms I create, fieldset and label are second nature to me, and rel is used in a number of lightbox implementations which is where I first came to grips with it.

I can see real uses for cite, optgroup, address and abbr, but I think the remaining tags, although useful in their own right, would only be applicable in a tiny number of cases, and wouldn’t class them as ‘must know’.

But saying that, I bet I’ll use them in the future now I know them! Great article to bring some little know tags to light.

wow.

I have to try using few of them !!!

yawn list ! what about interesting tags like .. dt, dl, dd, dfn, kbd, legend, sub .. ?

Nice post. If some designers took note, they separate their content and presentation even further.

I agree with Martin Sarsini. Fieldset and label aren’t really rare HTML tags.

I’m amazed to see some of these tags here as many are certainly not rare (and not all are tags anyway).

There’s also a few mistakes.

wbr is not part of either the HTML or XHTML specification, even though some browsers recognise it. It was designed to provide browsers with an optional place to break text within a nobr tag, so should always be used within a nobr tag (if you want to use invalid code).

A better example of acronym would be acronym title=”cascading style sheets” CSS. Your example is completely wrong.

The example for cite is misleading. A better example would be, for eg.
blockquote: paragraph from, say Wikipedia
cite: attribution to the source

(You will have to imagine the code since I cannot format here in the comments).

I wouldn’t recommend that anyone use this tutorial as a guide but if any of the tags or the rel attribute are new to you, look them up on the W3C site. There’s not much point in using new code if you don’t use it correctly!

Hey, where are the labels from point 7?

rel is not a tag, yes, you want to have a nice title, but you shouldn’t mislead beginners!

What? Wrong. Rel is used all over the place. It is used often to assign events in JavaScript to anchors with a given rel value. Ins and Del are used often as well. A lot of WYSIWYG editors use this when you do inserted strings or deleted strings (like in TinyMCE). And a decent amount of people use cite rather than blockquote.

And label? Lots of people use labels within forms.

Great article! I’ve been using “” instead of “” in my sites and will definitely revise them to reflect this more semantic mark-up. Thanks for the tip!

Yeah the address tag was never intended for marking up an address. I would always normally use it for a contact email address or similiar, basically contact details. Then use VCard Microformats to mark up an address.

Cool HTML tags ,but know most of them.

i have used some of them but the collection is superb……

I like the article. Funny, not too long ago I could have used that wbr tag! Next time, I’ll know. – Eric

most of those wer already used and written by me in my articles.

Great info very useful. I like the INS / DEL, and I should have known about the OPTGROUP, will be using in the near future.

This is a great article. Have added it to IHeartTopTens : http://www.ihearttoptens.com/view.php?uid=35

Great post, I forgot about some of those, and never heard of wbr.

Hi Glen,

When did the tag become a way of marking up geographical locations?

Saying that I dont think it has too contain actual addresses…

The last time I read about this tag was when it was used to mark up contact information related to the document itself… :S

Oh boy, back to the reading board…

You should make a note that ACRONYM is deprecated in XHTML in favour of ABBR as ABBR covers both acronyms and abbreviations semantically speaking. ADDRESS is not for location either as others have stated, HTML5 aims to deal with poorly named tags like this however.

“rel” is not a “html tag” so you really only have 9 on the list.

Most underused tag for sites containing code samples?

samp

Honestly, any decent HTML coder/producer not knowing and not using fieldset, label & legend when coding a form cannot pretend to be a pro-coder.

Those tags must be used when producing a form : basic accessibility.

As for rel, it is not a tag it is an attribute.
I agree it can be used with js a expained here but it is absolutely not the original pupose of this attribute.

Any of those tags, optgroup, cite…. are not obscure at all. They just have one very spcefic purpose and they cannot be used or tricked into becoming anything else. Any pro-coder know those tags !

May be wbr is obscur indeed… So obscur that W3C does not know this tag!

Cool post thanks for the article. a big help. ^_^

I hadn’t seen nor heard of WBR until a day or so ago when I was trying to get code for a constant contact signup form. They had it sprinkled within.

Since I started using CSS I avoid these tags completely. If I want an address to look a certain way, I just make an address class in my stylesheet. Same for Blockquote, Cite, etc. My own class names are usually easier to remember than old html 1 tags.

THe problem is that if I leave it up to the browser, and each browser interprets these tags differently, than I have to take complete control anyways. Might as well make them classes.

(though I must admit though that “acronym” would be useful)

From an accessibility perspective, it drives me nuts when label tags are not used. While you can select the corresponding input field by clicking on the text, labels also give those input fields real names that are read aloud when using a screen reader. (Rather than just “Input Blank” it would read “Input Username,” or something along those lines.)

As web designers, a main focus should be accessibility.

For , I’ve been using microformats, and I didn’t even know , , or existed! – although I have been using for and I think the underline from may be confused with a decorated link tag.

Thanks for the run down!

And 1 more thing, if u call yourself a webdesigner and never heard of this tags then i don’t know what to say.
6 out of 10 are used in almost every work

The address tag is not only for addresses. It is meant to display the page author or owner’s contact information, whether that includes name, phone number, email address, physicall address, etc.

And yeah, labels and fieldsets are essential for building forms properly, I don’t care what doctype you’re using.

This blog post has hit the twitter trending topics! Wow!

“The address element isn’t used for the purpose that you may expect—that being to mark up a physical location alone. Instead, it’s used to indicate the contact point for the document in which it appears. This element would usually appear in a header or footer on the page.” Sitepoint html reference

so can you?

Never heard some before.

I’ve come across most of these before but theres a few little odd ones including the . I don’t think I would leave it up to my browser to decide on the page breaks!

I do like the address and cite mark up however.

fieldset,cite and label are important on the semantic perspective and should be used.

Nice list. Your #8 live demo seems to not be working (I’m using Safari on Mac Tiger).

But I used acronym here! Lawrence77 Most of the wordpress comments supports this!
its not a rare then!
But all the others are very cool!
thanks for sharing!

They’re “elements” not “tags”. And in the example not applying a element to text adjacent to a radio button input allows both radio buttons to be selected. By using with the matching name to the you can assure only one radio button can be selected, and the label itself is clickable.

I have been looking for something like optgroup, i was just using another option with out a value to separate option lists.

thanks

You can do all this with css.

“Rare” HTML tags?

Doesn’t ‘rare’ imply collectibility? It’s kind of difficult to collect intangibles like, well, HTML tags. I think the word you’re looking for is ‘obscure’.

I’ll leave you alone about how you actually used said tags; everyone above me has tore into you enough as it is.

All in all, a disappointing article from NetTuts; it’s like the site is losing its touch. It’d be understandable if this were written by some guest columnist type, but Glenn is a regular contributor here. That’s too bad, I guess one can’t stay at the top forever. Or even readable.

Don’t forget the button tag. Incredibly more useful than input submit

Pretty dope, I always forget these. Thanks for sharing.

Just a few comments:
– I sat in on an accessibility lecture not too long ago and they really ripped using “optgroup”, turns out it’s very confusing to a screenreader.

- acronym is being dropped because of the cloudy definition and overlap with abbr. So we’re using abbr now (personally, I like using acronym over abbr, when there’s gray area).

- while “rel” is a great attribute. Using it to define a clickable region is a bit of a stretch. The AIRA spec now takes care of defining roles for accessibility: http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria (should be finalized soon)

- for “wbr”, there’s a cool css3 property coming out for creating word-breaks, very cool. I’m looking forward to using it.

I think that’s all, good list though, I’ve never used “ins” or “del” before, very cool for editing!

is a possibiliy to tell the browser to make a line break here if necessary. I use it often in German language with words combined by “-”, because not all browsers brake these combined words: “Print-tastic” -> “Print-tastic”

To “syllabicate” large German words, I use “­”, which is unfortunately not interpreted by every browser.

… I use “& shy ;” (without spaces) …

Damn … “Print-tastic” -> “Print-<wbr /> tastic”

wow, welcome to web 101

any real frontend dev knows these.

Weird, all those tags i use often… Except the tenth.

Good article.. I knew about all of them but the tag.

thank you. i read every word!

Nice article, I never used any of them yet… I’ll try now!

Excellent article! For my 7+ years in web design, there were tags within this article unfamiliar to me.

The wbr tag really contradicts the semantic approach to HTML, so I would personally avoid using it, in favor of appropriate UTF characters. The rest are useful though, and I seriously doubt anyone has failed to notice the label element.

totally useless

If you’re going to use the <wbr> tag, at least self-close it. <wbr />

Also, why do you have a <span> outside of another element like a <p>?

Additionally, with regards to “rel”, if the argument is for working with JavaScript, use a class or an id instead because rel is not supported by all browsers. for example, <a class=”clickable”> would be better than <a rel=”clickable”>

Nice List!

Gopal Raju
productivedreams.com
twitter.com/gopalraju

I use “fieldset” and “label” very often.

Great article, Glen! Interesting how many people talk about the semantic web but noone is currently using existing tags that makes the code more semantic.

I use on the contact page, and whenever I make an explanation or a definition of an expression someone maybe is looking for, I use the -tag.

The and is a very good SEO-tool, because you have USA and United States of America at the same time in the text whithout bothering people with repetition, and the search engine knows that you are really talking about the United States and not about another kind of USA like the Unbelieveable Sucker Association.

Taking a look at the next generation tags of xhtml I really wondered that these guys didn’t take the chance to create a bunch of semantic tags that enables a machine to discover what a text really contains. Examples:

(image with content) vs. (functional image) vs
(outstanding content that appears on every page and should not be considered to be part of the content)
(visible label line under an image)
(in a new semantic way)

…

Okay, I made a mistake. Every label I used disappeared in the visible text Including those ones I invented.

Wow… that was great!!! Thanks for bringing these to light/

Good post! I had forgotten some of these (and learned some new ones).

Great underused tags.

<dl> <dd> <dt>

underused tags

I think people are frustrated because this site is frequented by beginners: i.e. people that will be our colleagues and employees in the future. So let me state the things that I feel should either be corrected or removed:

1. Labels and fieldsets are not rare at all. It’s part of web form best practices. It is part of giving your web forms a good structure. Unless you learned web design/development purely from W3CSchools, labels and fieldsets are not rare or obscure at all. Most web developers who actually do web development know this already and to say “one of the most forgotten” implies that it’s rarely used and therefore isn’t important, which it is if you care about a semantic structure and better accessibility. A more obscure ‘tag’ in my experience from working with developers of all levels are <pre> and <code> – it’s a favorite interview question of mine to gauge their knowledge of HTML.

2. the rel example is just not good. I say this because that is poor use of the rel tag. Based on the argument used, it should be a class and ID. Using rel also invalidates your code so if you care about standards set by W3C, avoid this attribute at all cost.

3. rel example again: “and it knows to apply some Ajax“… um… wtf. What does that even mean?

4. The example used in the rel attribute example is NOT “one of many techniques you can use”, you shouldn’t use rel for the example you used – the right way would be through a class or ID for that example.

5. <wb /> should be used in the example, not <wb> if you absolutely must use it. Note that in the reference you used, in the footer section of Quirksmode it says “this page is not valid and is for testing purposes only”

6. In number 10, Should really change <span> to <p> because (a) you should never have a span tag that isn’t enclosed in another element, (b) it would be semantic to do so.

7. If you insist on calling it tags, then there are only 9 ‘html tags’ on here because rel is an attribute of an ‘html tag’.

I hope you truly consider revising some of the errors on this article because new and young developers will be reading this – it’s a big responsibility to make sure that you always share best practices and promote web standards, for the sake of those of us who have to work with the new guys.

That’s it, after going through all these comments and nearing brain implosion, I’m switching all my scripts to WHITESPACE.

IMO, tags should have been mentioned.

great post! very useful, thanks!

Muy interesante, gracias.

Wow, there are some tags I didn’t know. I gonna try it later.

First, I will tell you this pretty straight: You’re the worst writer from Nettuts from my point of view. Considering the comments, others may share my thought.

All other tutorials offer valuable information while yours show 10 “things” all the time. No offense but if you not technical enough and can’t create a important and valuable information – that’s OK. All you have to do is research and find out. But try and verify your content before sending it to the community.

PS: Thank you guys for this valuable comments. This is a real community.

Cheers!

Wow, I haven’t seen many of these. Thanks for posting!

I might start using acronym now!

I don’t see how a person can call themselves a “web developer” when they have very little understanding of the most basic thing about web development: HTML. Why didn’t you use a labels for yes and no in the fieldset example? Have you worked with forms before, because if you have, how can you say label and fieldset are rare? If the answer is yes to my question and you have worked with forms before, that’s just sad.

label, fieldset and rel are commonly used most of the time.

Great articles and very useful! I been doing html for more than 5 years and honestly I don’t know what is the use of those html tags! Thanks!

is not a valid html 4.01 or xhtml 1 tag. The wbr-element is not part of w3c’s HTML spec at all. That’s the reason the tag is little known or used. My advice would be to stick to standards.

I just want to say I use the wbr tag in my site, and I am happy with it. I have a script that inserts it every 20th character in long unbroken strings of characters, to allow them to break. These are usually long URL’s that are being printed on the page, and so nice wrapping is very helpful.

Also, my script instead uses ­ if on Safari (since safari doesn’t support wbr), and ­ does almost the same thing, but with a printable hyphen at the break point. The combination of the two covers all major browsers and provides nice wrapping.

Standards be darned, there are uses for things like this. And it seems to be well supported at the moment.

btw, I should have known that the character wouldn’t print well. The character I was referring to is &shy.

I’ve only used three of these in all my web development years, many thanks.

Great article, many of these tags were long forgotten!

RT
http://www.privacy-tools.us.tc

Some of these tags are incredibly useful for making use of semantic markup. It always makes sense to use the tag which best describes the content. Tags like and do just that.

Whoaaa!!!!

Never heard some of them, and even if heard never really thought about the specific use for which it must have been meant…

Anyways, will love to use them, but only those who validates my HTML clean.

This article is disgraceful to both newbies who are using it to learn from and REAL professionals who know better.

You know what else is a rare tag? . Double points if you nest it in a . Triple points if you use comic sans and apply it using the tag

The sad part is my sarcastic example is every bit as valid as your example of the REL attribute. If you are going to use it for “AJAX” you’re better off just make up a attribute such as anotherNonValidJunkAttribute=”clickable” because they can be targeted the same in JavaScript but in my example Google won’t read the REL and think that the link is related to “clickable”

Would Mr. Stansberry please stop posting about things most people either already know about or don’t care about.

In these Web 2 days, label and fieldset are pretty commonly used for designing forms; and rel is of course used everywhere. So at least these three are not “rare”. optgroup is also pretty common, though it is starting to become less common now a days mostly because select boxes are being replaced by custom lists.

“If you were wanting to achieve the same effect but without using the tag, you could also try ​ or ­­.”

I love ” ” and ” “!
No, just kidding. You might want to fix that, though.

Anyway, great stuff! Very interesting to see some “new” and more importantly, simple HTML.

Man, these tags are awesome. Its really helpful for Webmasters, I will use them in my Websites. Specially the Acronym Tag, its really good and worth using.

WOW, I already know 2 of them only
thanks

I think, the comments section is more informative than the actual article. And it actually is.

Thanks Paul and Jacob for sharing your thought else many of the readers might not have able to the tags correctly.

But what about those, who do not care to read comments!!

Great great article.
As an advanced web developer I rarely come across an article that
teaches me something new about XHTML :p

but here it is! i didn’t know about this !
great thing this tag!

although CSS3 word-break should replace is very soon..

Try http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/21-lesser-known-semantic-elements/ instead

wbr is great for long words when listing narrow li’s . You can count letters and add it when the letter count exceeds the li’s width.

Would Mr. Stansberry please stop posting about things most people either already know about or don’t care about.,.

Great article, I’ll keep it as a reference. Perhaps I’ll use some of the tags in future.

If you’re going to abuse semantics instead of using acronym for definitions why not use abbr it’s shorter and there’s at least some rationale behind something like

[abbr title="twitter: a microblogging website"]twitter[/]

Whilst there’s no way “twitter” is an acronym. I just use a span with a class=”defn” attribute and a title then style it to match the acronym and abbr tags. Works the same way then and is more correct.

Wow I’d never heard of I’ll be giving it a go soon

And coming up, 10 things I’ve eaten in the last ten days, for the tenth time.

Seems the info porn side of web development is getting a little lean in the area of useful information for once.

Now get back to work and do something useful with your time.

I dunno, it just seems like if it’s outside the realm of a CMS, a Bullet Proof Web Design book or AJAX it’s treated as some lost art. Kinda sad really, seeing self proclaimed developers thinking simple HTML or XHTML tags are forgotten or rarely used.

It’s a decent article with some strange examples to support the points made, but over all it went well with the time I had to kill.

Really useful post

No tag? This is one of the rarest and most useful tags I’ve come across.

As someone that is an HTML buff and doesn’t want to make the jump to any automated systems like wordpress, it’s nice to see these commands.

I think that I have been living under a rock all this while, the tutorial is really awesome. I like the way the rel tag has been explained.

At the section, you mention instead of . BTW, great post! Thanks for it!

I hazard a guess that would stand for “wrapping break”, meaning that the break would occur if the line of text had to be wrapped inside a container or table cell or something. That would be useful today, I can’t stand seeing the amount of widowed and orphaned text on web pages in general.

Anyway, like 1000+ people have said before me, there’s a good reason why alot of these tags are not in use. They’re replaced with better solutions, or CSS. God help you if you use or , or or for that matter.

And god help the moderators if they let these obscure tags get through on their forum comment section!

At the fieldset section, you mention label instead of legend. BTW, great post! Thanks for it!

the radioboxes don’t work right because you’ve given them different name attributes.

Fine article, i will use the acronym tag more often now.

Great Work!!!

I like the entry, however, like half of these aren’t that rare.

Good post, you learn something new every day… not too heartbroken that doesn’t validate.

and , and other new tags are coming in html 5
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/html5.asp

Fun post – WBR was a surprise to me.

In response to all the complainers… You can never make all the geeks happy. I think the post is great and I appreciate the effort to put this list together.

Make sure to check our my friend’s site containing lists of commonly underused HTML tags:

http://showmehtml.com/

wbr is invalid markup!

document.write(’xss’);

Great list of tags. The cite one is very useful, thanks for sharing!

stellar list

The TABLE tag should be in this list instead of LABEL… I use the LABEL tag all the time in order to create forms without tables. Regards!

Most are useless… just use styled divs damnit!

Note that there are characters such as zero-width space or soft-hyphens, that do the same job as the tags described here.

they are not really rare and they are used on pages where appropriate. i’ve seen them a lot on bibliographies, thesis, survey forms, etc. i agree with you on . it is hardly ever used.

Some very nice tags there that i haven’t seen before, Most of the tags you mentioned should be used more reguarly as they are very handy.

Thanks for this article.

Nice list. I would say that the rel attribute isn’t really all that rare. It’s starting to show up a lot for various JavaScript/AJAX and SEO tricks.

Your list is missing a set of tags that are rare in my opinion: DL, DD, and DT. The definition tags are rarely seen, but can be quite useful for term definitions or even FAQ pages.

I can only re-iterate what has already been said in the previous comments. Yet another woefully inaccurate article from Mr Stansberry. Here’s to future Nettuts+ articles being much more on-target and faithful to their titles!

More bugs: Your radio buttons are not linked so you can select all of them at once and on FF3 the fieldset does not draw a box around the fields. (At least, it doesn’t in your example.)

The wbr tag does not have good support across all browsers. More info on Quirksmode: http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html

“rel” seems out of place in a list of html tags but, as you said, it can be very useful and seeing it on anything other than link or anchor tags is quite rare.

Don’t forget when making AJAXy things that not every uses javascript. Make sure your links and buttons still work with javascript turned off. Especially in the case of links, this will help your Google ranking as well as not turning away visitors who don’t have javascript turned on. (Like me)

For instance, there are no labels on this comment form. They are placed inline using javascript after the page loads. I can either guess that they are in Name, email, URL format as most blogs use or I can look at the source code and hope that the names are descriptive. For some reason you have used the attribute “defaultvalue” in these input fields which does not exist rather than the more standard “value”… which would have worked. Using a label would have been a much better idea.

I think it would be a better use of your time to run your pages through the W3C validator than to start learning obscure and badly supported tags that add very little benefit to the average user.

Great Post, I never new they existed…

should be used for acronyms

acronyms are abbreviations pronounced as words rather than as inidividual letters

radar

laser

I enjoy the tag. I like to put it on text then specify a brown color with font-weight bold in CSS. Does the trick every time.

I miss the tag =)

I miss the marquee tag =)

haha I never use any of them except for the ‘rel’ tag. I guess I’m too young to saw them in action way back decades ago.

I think an important “rare” tag that is missing from this list is the q tag.

What’s most sad isn’t the fact that this Jesus-esque character “Glen Stansberry” made money on writing this “fine” piece of … article, but that more feeble minded developers are taking these “tips” at face-value, quite possibly applying them in their work. Here’s what I have to say: read the first 20 comments and learn the real deal.

The wbr-tag you say? Why not also enlighten us on the usage of the marquee-tag and the blink-tag too? Haven’t seen those around lately.

Jesus…you guys are such nit-picky bastards. Does anyone actually code or do you spend every ounce of your time picking through simple tutorials and arguing with each other over correct semantics…and spelling in each others comments. For christ sakes…i could only read like the first 15 comments before i confirmed that i was wasting my time. And yeah, i prolly spelled something wrong.

Thank you, I wasn’t aware of all of these, but now that I do, I’ll definitely be using a few of them.

Paul Armstrong – get over yourself.
It is most unfortunate that you used the phrase “Most unfortunate”.

Don’t make the comments your platform for showing how much you know.

Make your points and move on.

Debating whether on not NCAA is an abbreviation. Get a life.

It’s shopped

FAIL

Just another comment to read. Everything has been beaten to death in one direction or the other and I wanted to do something telling myself reading all of this was not a total waste of time. Cheers!

is no longer supported in IE8

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8

Good “aide-mémoire” ! is depracated by the w3c on the other hand…

2 other good tags to know too are the and for like 3rd

post took out the tags the 2 are sub and sup tags

i can’t quite believe I didn’t know some of those tags. What particularly surprised me is the existence of the optgroup tag. It also seems to work cross-browser.

is missing in my comment, sorry.

<wbr> … grrr

Improper HTML in example 7, you haven’t closed the input elements.

What has happened to the TUTS? There’s an awful lot of sales-pitch lists and poor/under researched content… Why would I consider paying for the TUTS+ stuff if this is the quality diplayed?

Those really are rare tags, so rare that I’m not sure if they’re even really very useful.

thirdsoul.net Visit It !

You should have used label’s with your fieldset.

blah
Input one

Input two

Now if you were to click on either the radio button or the label its self you would select the radio button. It is very handy ^^

I hate this website. Too many great tuts and not enough time!!
by the time I read one 3 more appear.

Cool haven’t herd most of them… thanks for sharing!!!!!!

label and fieldset are not rare though.. still, good list.

great tuts

Sorry to tbe the fly in the ointment but you really are missing some important stuff here and its quite typical of the semantically challenged.

1) acronym is not for adding info about something, if you want to do that use a span. It’s a *specific* form of abbreviation NOT expansion. YMCA, FBI etc are acronyms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialism

2) abbr – even though this is a great tag (even though ppl use acronym instead wrongly) it’s not supported by ie6/7 [and probably 8] so nothing will show up if you use it.

Was hoping for an informed article but this fails, epically.

Nice tips, but I even like the comments more!

The and tags seem very useful! Search engines can pick these up well? Interesting post!

Thanks for the rare tags info! I found really useful in my recent project.

Nice list. However, your fieldset example doesn’t work. You need to have the name attribute be the same. Since your example uses different names, they will both be selected instead of one OR the other.

Optgroup was AMAZING!
Why haven’t we seen this in popular usage yet?

Facebook uses the tag quite well to wrap names and certain other elements that they need to show in limited-width boxes.

In my opinion, this is great, yet highly underused tag.

This stretched my brain a bit. Mad props. Great design, love it.

Last point. wbr tag.. “you could also try ​ or ­­. “” ?? What’re the other tags?
Thanks for the article

bad

very bad,,,dnt u know anything about html???rel is not a tag…its attribute…u stupid…stop posting these tags on net

Your definition of the tag is wrong : you say it «defines a group of words» but, as its name says, it actually defines an acronym… «Twitter» isn’t an acronym, «SEO» is.

Yeah, I really don’t use those HTML tags at all. I’m trying to figure out how to get a list arrow for my css navigation pane. Anyone’s input would be greatly appreciated.

Tag 2. is something nice.

I implemented something equivalent using some funny logic of having space in front of normal list items.

Impressive compilation.

I was prepared to reply after the first half of tags and brag that I got to use them all. But I have to admit, the last one: wbr is the one I didn’t use.

btw I think wbr is no longer supported in ie8. Microsoft just wants to be special.

I find this post very interesting ,so I am going to make a translation to Spanish in my blog. Thanks for writing it!

Great Articles…. Thank.

Actually, I never use one of them before. Common tags are enough for me, but it is great to know more

Good article. But please confirm is that correct acronym tag example ?

Just spotted a syntax error in the description of the tag.

“…but the benefits are many for screen readers…”

I think ‘many’ should be ‘mainly’

Thanks for sharing this info. This was very helpful and educational