Forgotten HTML relics: from IE hacks to Baidu's page hijacking
Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts
The web is in constant flux, and so is its markup. This post catalogs obsolete HTML snippets that once served practical purposes—fighting browser wars, appeasing third-party integrations, or preventing unwanted modifications—but are now forgotten relics. It covers X-UA-Compatible tags, conditional comments for IE and Netscape, PICS labels, interpage transitions, frame busters, and meta tags for disabling Skype's toolbar, Baidu's transcoding, and more. Each snippet is a time capsule of web development's messy history.
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.