Theme 1 – Nostalgia for old‑browser hacks
Many commenters recall the painful work‑arounds needed for IE6‑8 and earlier versions, expressing relief that they’re mostly gone.
“Conditional comments are still part of HTML email templates. Though soon will be dead I hope.” – Semaphor
“Forever burnt into my mind is PNG alpha work‑arounds in IE:filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='image.png');.” – nness
“I remember tables with 9 cells, with cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 to remove spaces… and the spacer.gif.” – matsemann
Theme 2 – Current best practices for HTML meta tags
The discussion frequently turns to what modern markup should contain—viewport settings, UTF‑8 declaration, and the shift from Twitter‑specific cards to Open Graph.
“The latest MDN recommendation is to use only
width=device-width, withinitial-scalebeing mostly redundant.” – phil‑pickering
“<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width\">is all you need.” – OuterVale
“Meta keywords are still in the HTML5 spec… many search engines ignore them because of historic spam abuse.” – dchest
Theme 3 – Continued niche use of older features
Despite being labeled obsolete, several tags survive for specialized purposes such as ruby annotations for East‑Asian text, internal site search keywords, or conditional comments in email.
“Love the ruby tags on Chinese text!!” – LoganDark
“I use them whenever I have an excuse!” – OuterVale (referring to<ruby>)
“I still use meta keywords for my custom website search… external engines may ignore it, but it’s useful locally.” – dchest (supported by myfonj noting Yandex still respects them)