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10 HTML Elements You Didn't Know You Needed

Emma Bostian ✨ on March 18, 2019

I’ve heard the sentiment “HTML is easy” more times than I can count. And while I would agree that HTML is perhaps easier to learn than other progra...

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Felippe Regazio • Mar 22 '19 • Edited

Awesome Emma, thank you! I would like to add one of my favorites:

<details>
      <summary>Click To Open</summary>
      Hey, im natively collapsable. My content remains hidden till you click on Summary.
</details>

Martin Dimmock • Jun 10 '19

Nice. Needs a polyfill though.

Felippe Regazio • Jun 10 '19

True. But nice yet ;P

vitor • Apr 1 '19

LOL

Nans Dumortier • Mar 18 '19

Great article Emma, I would just have liked to see what the html elements look like, side by side with the code. This is just my preference though !

I learnt a lot, a I must admit I didn't know most of the tags you have presented. Thanks !

Emma Bostian ✨ • Mar 18 '19

I thought about adding that as well! Maybe I'll edit ;)

JoppeDC • Mar 18 '19

This would definetly add to the already high quality of the article, i found myself typing most of these into an online editor to check what they look like :D

Emma Bostian ✨ • Mar 18 '19

Hehe cool I'll do that thanks :)

Emma Bostian ✨ • Mar 18 '19

I added the ones I could!

fluffy • Mar 25 '19

So, one big thing I'd mention on this article in general is that you're using images to show the code, which isn't very accessible. It would be much better to use fenced code blocks (three backticks); for example,

<blockquote cite="http://example.com/">
    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
</blockquote>

The code for the above being:

```html
<blockquote cite="http://example.com/">
    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
</blockquote>
```

Emma Bostian ✨ • Mar 26 '19

True thanks!

Ines Kondor • Jan 6 '20

Thanks a lot for the hint - is there an equivalent for this "trick" in HTML, please?

fluffy • Jan 6 '20 • Edited

The three-backticks stuff is specific to Markdown, although it's usually handled by a library such as Pygments, which you can certainly use on its own as well.

YOu can also use the <pre><code>...</code></pre> tag to preformat stuff although that won't do syntax highlighting and you'll need to convert < to <. (Technically you only need <pre> but that's a visual tag while <code> is the semantic tag to say what the text represents.)

Ines Kondor • Jan 6 '20

Thank you very much for your quick response.

Yes, it is the need to convert the angle brackets plus also keeping the indentation/readability intact that is kind of odd to do still "manually" in 2020. (Am sure there are online converters or we could write one ourelves, but still ... hoping for a more efficient way)

Jonathan Kuhl • Mar 18 '19

HTML is easy, but you're right, there are a ton of useful tags out there that people aren't aware of. The <picture> tag is one I've never known about and it sounds like a very useful way to handle images in a responsive web page.

And HTML does start getting complex when you start thinking in terms of semantics and accessibility.

Pranat • Mar 19 '19

Yes, a few people focus on semantics and accessibility. So, they say HTML is easy.

Christopher Hall • Mar 18 '19 • Edited

Thanks for sharing! One thing to note though is that if you have to support older browsers like Internet Explorer, some of these tags are not supported there.

output
picture
meter
template
time

Edit: Instead of avoiding these tags, you can use them as part of a progressive enhancement strategy. However that is more complicated and takes more time to test.

Joe Beretta • Mar 18 '19

I think we can start forget about IE, because even Microsoft want's en it up

Mingan • Mar 20 '19

That would be very nice but it's still a looong way away. I just checked our numbers and IE is ~7% of our visitors. Almost all of them are IE11 which can be reasoned with somewhat. However, the numbers aren't going down at all.

Joe Beretta • Mar 20 '19

Yeah, it's sad. But what if... What if just start campaign of ignoring IE?

Mingan • Mar 20 '19

On what grounds? The fact that developers don't like IE has almost no weight as an argument. The users with IE are not just drive-by's on the public site but they are actual paying users. In order to drop IE11 support, the percentage has to drop to a level where the cost of potentially losing them outweighs the cost of maintaining IE11 compatible code. Since we're usually not doing anything too crazy it's not a huge problem to support IE11, it's just annoying to work with when a problem occurs.

Thibaut Allender • Mar 20 '19

ignoring IE = ignoring users = ignoring customers = ignoring money. If you can afford it, do it, but that probably means you're running a charity.

Fred Ross • Mar 25 '19

There's a tradeoff. How much developer time does it cost to support IE, and how much revenue would you lose from not supporting it?

Or, if you are dealing with paying customers, tell them support is dropping, and tell anyone who screams and insists on the old browser that they have to pay for keeping support just for them. If they're just being ornery, they'll usually grumble and upgrade. If they are really stuck, they'll often pony up cash.

Maximilian Berkmann • Mar 27 '19

True, people who only used IE should have (at least) moved to Edge by now. There's little to no reasons as to why a user would still use IE.

Desi • Mar 18 '19

I've never seen <wbr> before, that's super helpful!

goodbytes • Mar 25 '19

Same here, thanks for that !

Jason R Tibbetts • Mar 18 '19 • Edited

The ≤ of the output tag blew my mind.

I still lament the deprecation of the <blink> tag.

EDIT: Ah, that's because the opening element isn't ≤; it's =<, which is rendered in some typefaces with the single glyph.

Aaron Powell • Mar 19 '19

I noticed that too but I'm guessing it's a font like Fira Code that has ligatures in it.

Davyd McColl • Mar 20 '19

Great stuff Emma. Would love to see browser support information. I know it's time-consuming to look up. I'm going to head off to MDN to look for myself, but I think the info would add something valuable to an already valuable article.

Emma Bostian ✨ • Mar 20 '19

You should check out CanIUse!

Davyd McColl • Mar 20 '19

I don't have enough ♥'s. And some kind person wrote a cli client for it too: github.com/sgentle/caniuse-cmd

Davyd McColl • Mar 20 '19

I also see that blockquote can have cite as a child element -- and then the citation is displayed nicely for the user. I'm definitely going to use that sometime. Thanks again for the awesome article (:

Stephen Irving • Mar 28 '19

You can also write scss code and compile it to css with vendor prefixes added automatically for the browsers you tell the compiler to support, based on caniuse.com data. A lot of the new HTML5 elements can be supported with js polyfills and normalizer css too.

Thibaut Allender • Mar 20 '19

I would avoid using the picture element in 2019. It's mostly a remanent from the first responsive images implementation. img now also has access to easier srcset and sizes attributes and has a smaller footprint. See ericportis.com/posts/2014/srcset-s... , especially part 2.

fluffy • Mar 25 '19

Yeah, came here to say the same thing – img srcset is supported everywhere, already gives you correct fallback "for free" (since you still declare a src attribute for that purpose), and provides all of the CSS query selector stuff in a much more compact, easily-parsed and easily-generated format. For example, the article's code would be captured as <img src="img_kitten.jpg" alt="Kitten" srcset="img_cat_fat.jpg 650w, img_cat_fluffy.jpg 465w">

Christopher C. Johnson • Mar 18 '19

Awesome post!

Just remember to check against caniuse.com

Nikolay Stoynov • Mar 18 '19

I know that. What a boring arti... wait... that's interesting! Wow, I didn't knew I can do that!

My thoughts reading the article. Great job! :)

Emma Bostian ✨ • Mar 18 '19

Thank you!

Hibs • Mar 18 '19

What do you think is the difference between using <picture> versus <figure> for images and their captions? I've been using <figure> but now I'm reconsidering whether I should have been using <picture> instead this whole time 🤔

WORMSS • Mar 20 '19 • Edited

Time seems it will be useful for my work. We are looking into accessablity and that seems a top contender.

Thankfully unlike someone in these comments, we are able to ignore IE and have stated you are REQUIRED to have a modern browser.

Jérôme Pott • Mar 18 '19

Thanks! Always good to get reminded of the variety of HTML tags.
I recommend checking this website out for a nice overview of all HTML tags:
htmlreference.io/

alix brunsperger • Mar 28 '19

Great article ! Thanks for the work and sharing =)

I am curious about one thing, with the tag picture, does that load every image on the first load of the page, or only the one needed according the media query ?

Emma Bostian ✨ • Apr 1 '19

Not sure!

Brennan Young • Jan 9 '20

A couple of additional comments from an accessibility perspective:

Output is treated by most user agents as a "live region" by default. Spec does not require this, but that's how it works IRL. That means that screen readers will announce whatever text nodes are inside the output.

Audio and Video - please remember captions and (for video) audio descriptions. These are just as important as the video sources. Apart from accessibility concerns, video without captions will fail to reach its full communicative potential, or even be skipped in situations where people have the sound off. (e.g. sneaking a look at your social media feed during a meeting or presentation, or on public transport). Captions multiply reach enormously.

With the time element, the datetime attribute is really important for screen readers, so that they know whether to announce 00:00 as "midnight" or "zero minutes, zero seconds" or whatever. For elapsed time (rather than 'clock' time) prefix the datetime value with an uppercase P, such as 00:05

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Mar 18 '19

I have always thought that audio and video are well known and blockquote too but I guess it's all relative? The others have rare but valid use cases. A11y will benefit from the above in proper usages, thanks for sharing.

Ahmid-RA • Mar 22 '19 • Edited

template IS WRONG! appending a template is inconsequential. template.content is what you want to "append. Template is just a declarative way to create a documentFragment. THEORETICALLY correct. But net result is zero. developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...

Emma Bostian ✨ • Mar 23 '19

Lol well you could've been a little nicer about it..

Ahmid-RA • Mar 24 '19

What did I say that was false? I contribute to open source daily. And when you're wrong they tell you you're wrong. No malice. Just truth. If I didn't explain or show HOW to correct the wrong. THEN i'm an asshole. Do remember intent rarely plays out well in comment section.

No good deed goes left unpunished... ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Perhaps shouldn't have used caps in retrospect? I'll take accountability for that.
Enjoy your Sunday Emma :-)

Anna • Mar 25 '19

You can be honest and still have good manners. It's not that difficult.

dAVE Inden • Mar 18 '19

Awesome post. It is a great reminder of what can be done with purely HTML. I think that sometimes many (including myself) get caught up with how to implement things using Javascript that we can forget what HTML is capable of doing on its own and that we don’t have to over complicate things.

Stephen Smith • Mar 18 '19

What a great read. Will definitely try out and use these elements!

Kaartic Sivaraam • Mar 26 '19 • Edited

Seems the rendering of the needs improvement in Firefox for Android. I had no idea it was a scroll bar.

This is how it was rendered: thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i...

Jason Towle • Mar 18 '19

Thanks for this Emma, picture and wbr may come in handy in particular.

Emma Bostian ✨ • Mar 18 '19

I don't think I can add the picture example on CodePen because I can't upload a local picture

Jason Towle • Mar 18 '19

No worries, just making me aware of the tag is good enough for me :)

Thanks again!

Adam Whitlock • Mar 19 '19

Great article!

Another lesser known element I discovered a bit ago is the
Super simple way to make a pure html "accordion" of sorts
codepen.io/moose62712/pen/MEqGxd

Islam Sayed • Mar 19 '19

Thank you for the good article. , , , , and are new to me.

Adeniyi • Mar 18 '19

interesting reminder this one. Keep it up

Jean Karlo Obando Ramos • Mar 20 '19

Great article. Thanks

Newfrontendweekly • May 15 '19

Hi!
Emma,
Can I reprint the translation into Chinese and share it with Chinese developers?
I will point out the source and author.

Emma Bostian ✨ • May 15 '19

Sure thank you! :)

Paul Wellner Bou • Apr 29 '21

Thank you!
There is another one I was not aware of until recently: <kbd>: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...

Joe Beretta • Mar 18 '19

Thanx for all these tags) and personally, would be thankful if you'll tell more about

Brian De Sousa • Mar 26 '19

Great article! I have been working with HTML for so many years and several of these were news to me. I really appreciate the side-by-side CodePen examples too.

Visakh Vijayan • Mar 30 '19

Really cool ... I didn't know about the template tag. Will definitely use it in my next code. Thank you.

Isa Levine • Mar 18 '19

so handy--i'm diving into rails and catching up on html as i go, and this is super-helpful!

Jon de M • Mar 18 '19

Browser support next to each html element would be great

Taylor Short • Mar 18 '19

Thanks for the article! Always important to be as semantic as possible

Darren Burns • Mar 18 '19

Thanks Emma, nice post. I only knew about a couple of these before :)

cristiano • Mar 19 '19

This is great! Don’t know how I’ve missed the output tag as I find my self having all these outputs in my prototypes and I just place them in paragraphs or divisions. No more 😆

Rahul Parshi • Mar 18 '19

Out of 10 tags I had used only

Blockquote tag

that to while commenting on your 6 tips for productivity article 😁😁😁

Max Antonucci • Mar 18 '19

Like many here, I'll definitely be keeping that wbr tag in mind. It could have saved from a lot of past headaches!

Gift Egwuenu • Mar 18 '19

Thanks for sharing Emma 🤗

Massimo Artizzu • Mar 18 '19

I would mention <dialog>, although its support isn't great. I have an article brewing about it 🤫😄

🌌 Sébastien Feugère ☔ • Dec 18 '19

really amazed by the <template /> tag.

Irma Mesa • Mar 19 '19

Totally didn't know some of these existed. The progress and output tags were the most interesting to learn about.

Ian Markind • Mar 19 '19

Really good information, thanks!

Mike Healy • Mar 20 '19

This is great.
I'm excited about the prospect of doing some art directed cropping with the <picture> element, but it does open up a can of worms when it comes to CMS or dynamic data sources.

snydez • Mar 21 '19

cool!
thank you for this tip

danx16 • Mar 21 '19

thank you for your helpful post.

Roland Taylor • Mar 18 '19

Thanks! There are few of these that I never heard of - time to experiment!

Mohannad Salah • Mar 18 '19

This is awesome
Thanks for sharing

I love how you included an image of the code for mobile users ❤️ (accessibility for everyone)

Aaron • Apr 4 '19 • Edited

Thanks for this. Didn't know wbr existed :)

Stanley Bateswar • Dec 18 '19

Thank you Emma

Rifai Martin • Mar 26 '19

there are still many that I don't know about HTML :D hahaha

sesay • Apr 2 '19

amazed , with the break tag . and the progress tag ;)

Pawan Chaurasia • Mar 26 '19

didn't knew html has some pretty cool stuff to. and most of them I never used.

Alice-sos • Apr 15 '19

Hi,

I hope to get your consent to translate and shared with Chinese developers, I will indicate the source and author.

Ofir Meguri • Mar 31 '19

Big like

yash kumar tiwari • Apr 25 '20

No you not mentioned the other ones please refer this for more extra

thewebuniverse.blogspot.com/

Uddesh • Mar 18 '19

I will definitely try to use these tags next time, thanks for sharing.

Lewis Cowles • Apr 22 '19

Oh man... template, output and wbr. My new toys to play with

Pachi 🥑 • Dec 24 '19

Thank you soo much Emma!
This article has some great information and you explain everything in a great well, it is saved here so I can always come back and check in case I forgot.