> default style looks dated

Browser defaults for all HTML elements look "dated". The visual appearance of meter, as with all elements, is adjusted via CSS.

> . map/area - it's absolute positioning, which is unusable for the variety of devices we use today

It's relative to the image dimensions, not the page/viewport.

That was my first thought... if people don't use these very old elements any more, there's probably a good Chesterson's fence-type reason. Frames seemed really cool when I first saw them too, until I actually started trying to support them.

Frames died when AJAX became available. People were bastardizing frames so that they could change the content in a window without refershing the entire window.

That was largely iframes, though they are still in use for some things like certain methods of ad delivery. frames/framesets were often about partial updates, but mostly where script wasn't wanted so AJAX (once available) wasn't an option either.

Having lived through that era, Frames (and Framesets) were mostly killed by the proliferation of PHP on cheap hosts. A lot of Frames were used for building navigation elements without a lot of copy/pasting between HTML files (headers, footers, navigation bars, etc). The alternative to frames was either copy/pasting or ancient early static site generators. When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-side inclusions. These days we've come full circle back around to static sites but not returned to frames simply by how much static site generators have either become more common and/or easier/better to use.

> When PHP became common and cheap most people moved to server-side inclusions.

You don't (and didn't) need PHP for server-side includes. Apache has had them forever. A lot of cheap hosting is LAMP stack, so has PHP available, but you don't need to use it to get SSI.

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html

At least from my experience it was easier to get PHP than SSI - often if you were getting SSI, it was in conjunction with basic PHP support.

Mind you, I'm talking about cheapest hosting possible, where 20 MB was a "step up" option.

From my experience SSI was not enabled on many hosts. If it was you usually had CGI or PHP too. Or maybe even mod_perl.

SSI was commonly enabled on university web servers IIRC, but not commercial hosts.

I did use SSI some. My impression at the time was that cheap hosts that rolled out Apache services and had SSI enabled also generally had PHP enabled and PHP was the "better" choice at that point because it was both more powerful and more portable given Apache's SSI was unique to it and not supported by other hosts (then or now).

Frames made a side or top nav clearly separated from the content in the middle. Framesets were super useful, in that regard, in the era of dialup.

>but not returned to frames

also, CSS Flex

Meter, progress and details/summary are from HTML5 so definitely not “very old”

I only bothered to check `details`, but that one dates back to at least the 2008 working draft of the HTML5 spec, which makes it ~14 years old - not absolutely ancient, but far from recent!

But IE and EdgeHTML-based Edge never supported <details>, so you had to polyfill it somewhat imperfectly. So one of the major browsers only gained support for it in 2020.

This was a significant dissuader, especially when you consider how you can’t transition the height (very often desirable) without added JavaScript. So <details> has really only been seeing much use in the last few years.

(The minimum possible polyfill is just under 750 bytes, supporting IE9+/Edge, requiring <summary> to be provided, and disallowing text children of <details>. The typical polyfill was more like 2–3KB.)

to keep track of all of these in my personal css framework, i made an entry in the base stylesheet for every html element, even including a couple deprecated but widely supported ones (i also keep a list of fully deprecated elements in comments), though not every element gets styled beyond the default.

meter/progress can be styled consistently, but it's tricky because of the browser inconsistencies you mention. it took a lot of playing around with weird vendor-prefixed pseudos to get these looking similar across platforms.

sub/sub/abbr just need to be normalized first - normalize.css is a good reference for this. abbr can be useful for providing short "aside" info on a word/phrase in a semantic way.

styling detail/summary is relatively easy and they're pretty useful for FAQs and the like. i see web designers experimenting with more and more these days.

map/area, i don't use, but have seen it used on experimental designs to neat effect. and object is as you said, hard to predict for styling.

ps - it looks like chrome (105) will finally support mathML along with firefox and safari, so perhaps that will impact sub/sup usage in the future.

The problem with detail/summary is that in some browsers that element is hard to style correctly and always turns out to be so limited that you ask yourself why you don’t fully develop this functionality manually and put some aria attributes on it for good WCAG2.1 measure.

Also applies to progress, for which you need to use obscure browser-specific CSS rules.

For some reason <object> makes me anxious. Is there some memory of the Flash/ActionScript days, or maybe ActiveX or something, that causes me to frown at seeing a mention of <object>?

<object> is supposed to be for exposing modules from hosted runtimes into the host execution-context as, well, objects (in the OOP sense. Or the COM sense, I suppose.)

The original use-case would have been something like: imagine you code a game physics engine in Java, and deploy it as a Java applet. You can embed that physics engine into a page as an <object> — and then consume it as a local API using JavaScript embedded on the same page.

(And yes, this is almost certainly the real reason JavaScript is called "JavaScript." When it was created, it was precisely positioned as a glue language for consuming/driving Java-applet APIs!)

Java-applet-based APIs (and their Windows-proprietary ActiveX cousins) are dead, so there's no real reason to care about <object> any more. As long as the browser knows how to render the media if you navigate directly to its URL, you can just use an <iframe>.

Ah ha! It was Java applets that makes me dread seeing <object>/<embed> tags again. Gotta support IE, you know. Netscape will crash anyway.

Probably, <object> to me will always be "the thing SWFObject used for rendering a Flash container"

<object> was often used for video and audio players as well as Flash, Shockwave, VRML and other plugins.

It's not needed anymore for audio or video — they have their own tags now — and plugins are dead.

> object - hard to know what filetypes will be supported and little feedback when they aren't.

Easier now that plugins are dead and <object> is basically equivalent to <iframe>

Until it's easier to add bloated animations to details/summary the designers will never let us use em