Back in the early HTML5 days some elements, mostly presentational, had to prove their usefulness to the WhatWG/Hixie to be included. So <b> was bold in HTML 4.01 but now is "text, to which attention is being drawn like product names". <i> was italic but is now for ship names (or "idiomatic text"). And <small> went from small text to fine "print/legal stuff".
I can see <big> being redefined similar. There are examples for the "big idea" of a text. The traditional article lede. Or the callout inside an article.
There are some fun ideas in older versions of HTML.
<listing> was already in deprecated in HTML 2.0, because of the parsing/content model, similar with <xmp> and <plaintext>. But I always found <pre><code></code></pre> annoying. XHTML 2 had a nicely named <blockcode> element, I would have liked that.
The aborted HTML 3.0 draft had some fun and wild stuff. Tabstops, a whole simplified math mode, an @md attribute for checksums (today Subresource Integrity) and still missing today an <fn> element for footnotes, a <note> element, a <person> element and a <banner>, which today would be a <header>.
We are still missing an CSS mechanism for the never implemented align="char" mechanism in HTML 4.01s tables.
<dir> was on is last gasps in HTML 4.01 and deprecated in Google’s HTML in favour of the more general ul/ol (but <menu> survived). But in the world of web applications a directory listing of someone's files or documents could have been useful. Think Github’s sidebar.
XHTML 2 had an <di> element for grouping definition list associations. HTML5 later retrofitted <div> for that, they didn’t want to change their parsing algorithm, I believe. The general <h> element is still missing, as is the <l> for a line of text like poetry or code. Also there is a <standby> element, which is funny to see in a web app world full of rotating spinners. @href and @src were allowed on all elements and there was an @edit attribute as a generalised version of <ins> and <del>.
Even HTML5 deprecated some parts of itself. iFrames had a `seamless` attribute which looked like it could do easier at least some use cases of the whole web components saga. But the “Living Standard” doesn’t seem to list the unliving parts of itself.
I find I do like that idea.
Back in the early HTML5 days some elements, mostly presentational, had to prove their usefulness to the WhatWG/Hixie to be included. So <b> was bold in HTML 4.01 but now is "text, to which attention is being drawn like product names". <i> was italic but is now for ship names (or "idiomatic text"). And <small> went from small text to fine "print/legal stuff".
I can see <big> being redefined similar. There are examples for the "big idea" of a text. The traditional article lede. Or the callout inside an article.
There are some fun ideas in older versions of HTML.
<listing> was already in deprecated in HTML 2.0, because of the parsing/content model, similar with <xmp> and <plaintext>. But I always found <pre><code></code></pre> annoying. XHTML 2 had a nicely named <blockcode> element, I would have liked that.
The aborted HTML 3.0 draft had some fun and wild stuff. Tabstops, a whole simplified math mode, an @md attribute for checksums (today Subresource Integrity) and still missing today an <fn> element for footnotes, a <note> element, a <person> element and a <banner>, which today would be a <header>.
We are still missing an CSS mechanism for the never implemented align="char" mechanism in HTML 4.01s tables.
<dir> was on is last gasps in HTML 4.01 and deprecated in Google’s HTML in favour of the more general ul/ol (but <menu> survived). But in the world of web applications a directory listing of someone's files or documents could have been useful. Think Github’s sidebar.
XHTML 2 had an <di> element for grouping definition list associations. HTML5 later retrofitted <div> for that, they didn’t want to change their parsing algorithm, I believe. The general <h> element is still missing, as is the <l> for a line of text like poetry or code. Also there is a <standby> element, which is funny to see in a web app world full of rotating spinners. @href and @src were allowed on all elements and there was an @edit attribute as a generalised version of <ins> and <del>.
Even HTML5 deprecated some parts of itself. iFrames had a `seamless` attribute which looked like it could do easier at least some use cases of the whole web components saga. But the “Living Standard” doesn’t seem to list the unliving parts of itself.
What’s the advantage over a little custom CSS?
I'm a little disappointed this page didn't use the <big> element anywhere.
Checking the MDN site, it still seems to work, even if it was deprecated. (no idea when)