Rarely used HTML tags
I know, I know. This really is train spotting or bird spotting stuff. (Why are there so few entries in Google for “HTML anorak”?) But it’s also a kind of confession.
In my last post, I wanted to emphasise that the tags I mentioned were bits of HTML, not bits of English. So I first used the tt tag to isolate them: short for ‘teletype’, this is a tag which displays its contents in a monospace font. A few minutes later, I realised my error. Old habits had swung into action while I was concentrating on something else. The tt tag is as bad as the b tag or the i tag. It’s purely presentational. And the tag I needed was there to be used: the code tag, which is there precisely to identify code.
I thought I’d make a list of similar tags: tags I hardly ever use—and have hardly ever seen used. Here they are: abbr, acronym, address, button, cite, colgroup, optgroup, q, tbody, thead, tfoot.
Lots of these tags look really useful, in principle. If you use one or more of them regularly, please leave me an example!