I remember when I realized the <hr> tag supported a color attribute...it was like pulling Excalibur out of the stone.

That's such a good analogy, I'm going to shamelessly steal this.

What do you mean? The <hr> tag is a semantic, valid part of html5.

http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/hr.html

<hr> is the vestigial tailbone of HTML

If your java applet just said hello it consumed so many resources. It took minute just to load java, what a stupid idea that was.

Not all that different from Flash, or any other container.

What's necessarily wrong with the <hr> tag? It still has its legitimate use cases.

For instance, when you list corporate structure on your website you can use it to delineate the HR department.

Heh. I wrote a JavaScript DHTML demo in 1999 that I locked to a browser window sized 640x480px because otherwise it made PCs grind to a halt and crashed Macs. Nowadays it runs on my phone just fine... Link for anyone who's interested: http://www.gilesthomas.com/old-javascript/stars/index.html

Just tell everyone you're using WebGL and submit it here.

Ironically, this is what I put together in 2009 (ten years after the DHTML demo) and it also crashed browsers then, and it also runs on my phone now: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217

Funny how that works.

I remember a friend would troll me by obscuring a url which led to this website that hosted an image with a ridiculously large resolution for computer hardware of the time to render, resulting in a BSOD within 10 seconds. Got me every time!

this was still a problem until very recently. A few years ago I linked a 50k by 50k image in an IRC channel, 2 people experienced an X crash and one had a kernel panic.

Care to find a similar site? I'd love to try it on my i7

I used to love the <HR> tag. Has anyone invented a better way to break up sections?

Borders and white space. Funny how much of modern clean design aesthetic was already possible to do with basic HTML back in the day but we were too fascinated with blinky flashy colorful tags to ask ourselves "Doesn't this altogether look like neon hell?"

We had to design websites in high school, circa 7-8 years ago. Pretty sure if anyone had implemented a flat desing they would have been given a D for poor effort.

It's all about that terrible blue button in Dreamweaver that animated concentric circles when you hovered over it..

Section? Sounds like something with a header? I would probably just wrap the section in a section tag.

Not necessarily. A horizontal rule (or flourish) is often used in fiction as a context-shift indicator within a chapter. Technical documents are not the only documents.