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Bogons and Semibogons

A bogon is an element that appears in an HTML document, but has never been recognized by any browser. You’ll often find them by viewing source on pages written by XML geeks like me. I got the term from John Cowan’s TagSoup, which has, a --nobogons switch to suppress any elements it doesn’t recognize.

A semibogon (my own coinage) is an old element that used to be recognized by one or more browsers but is no longer. Examples include:

  • marquee
  • basefont
  • bgsound
  • keygen
  • bgsound
  • spacer
  • wbr
  • nobr

I’m trying to generate a reasonably complete list of these semibogons for Refactoring HTML. Can anyone add to this list?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 9:52 am and is filed under Refactoring HTML, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

10 Responses to “Bogons and Semibogons”

  1. Mark Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/quicklist.html has it all. APP, MULTICOL, HTMLPLUS… the list is longer (and weirder) than most people realize.

  2. David Håsäther Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 11:11 am

    You can find some other obscure ones at http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagindex/all.htm

  3. Jim Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 11:49 am

    layer
    comment
    image

  4. Elliotte Rusty Harold Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 12:26 pm

    Layer is a good one to remember, though I think it does still have an effect in some browsers today. Who ever had a comment or image element?

  5. Jim Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 4:40 pm

    I seem to remember layer is special-cased in some way in KHTML. Apart from that, only Netscape 4 knows about it as far as I know.

    comment and image go back to Mosaic era, but I’m not sure exactly which browsers supported them.

  6. James Abley Says:
    February 28th, 2007 at 6:36 am

    bgsound – so good they used it twice!

  7. Mark Says:
    February 28th, 2007 at 2:46 pm

    To answer the second half of your question (which elements are still supported in modern browsers), http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/parser/htmlparser/src/nsElementTable.cpp#186 lists all elements recognized by Firefox. Search for “kExtensions” to pinpoint ones that aren’t part of any specification.

  8. Ian Hickson Says:
    March 9th, 2007 at 5:58 am

    marquee, basefont, bgsound, keygen, and wbr are all supported by most modern browsers.

  9. Philippe Lhoste Says:
    March 15th, 2007 at 11:37 am

    > marquee, basefont, bgsound, keygen, and wbr are all supported by most modern browsers.

    marquee, like blink, should be obsolete… So is bgsound (twice in the list above).
    basefont too, like font, CSS is here to bury them.
    keygen, I don’t know much about it.
    wbr, I discovered it here, and found it at http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html which shows alternatives. An interesting tag.

  10. Brett Says:
    August 15th, 2007 at 8:58 am

    I’ve gathered all the ones I could find in this Tidy feature request:
    https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=390966&aid=1763515&group_id=27659 . This is a very helpful resource: http://www.nic.fi/~tapio1/HTMLKit/AttributesProp.php3