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HTML's Best Kept Secret: The Output Tag

https://denodell.com/blog/html-best-kept-secret-output-tag
218•todsacerdoti•3h ago•39 comments

Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland

https://www.bluewin.ch/en/entertainment/nobel-prize-winner-opts-for-suicide-in-switzerland-261946...
84•kvam•3h ago•31 comments

AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/10/amd-and-sony-tease-new-chip-architecture-ahead-of-playstat...
129•zdw•6h ago•91 comments

Vietnam Airlines Data Breach

https://haveibeenpwned.com/Breach/VietnamAirlines
15•pbd•1h ago•6 comments

I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

https://fulghum.io/album-cards
406•jordanf•14h ago•134 comments

(Re)Introducing the Pebble Appstore

https://ericmigi.com/blog/re-introducing-the-pebble-appstore/
177•duck•13h ago•25 comments

AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

https://videocardz.com/newz/av2-video-codec-delivers-30-lower-bitrate-than-av1-final-spec-due-in-...
82•ksec•3h ago•37 comments

How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)

https://james-simon.github.io/blog/chicken-cooking/
87•jxmorris12•9h ago•43 comments

Tangled, a Git collaboration platform built on atproto

https://blog.tangled.org/intro
205•mjbellantoni•14h ago•51 comments

Synthetic aperture radar autofocus and calibration

https://hforsten.com/synthetic-aperture-radar-autofocus-and-calibration.html
105•nbernard•3d ago•7 comments

Intelligent Search in Rails with Typesense

https://avohq.io/blog/intelligent-search-in-rails-with-typesense
24•adrianthedev•3d ago•5 comments

Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

https://orb.net/blog/does-speed-make-wifi-suck
193•jamies•16h ago•234 comments

Programming in the Sun: A Year with the Daylight Computer

https://wickstrom.tech/2025-10-10-programming-in-the-sun-a-year-with-the-daylight-computer.html
89•ghuntley•11h ago•21 comments

Show HN: I invented a new generative model and got accepted to ICLR

https://discrete-distribution-networks.github.io/
574•diyer22•1d ago•75 comments

Show HN: Semantic search over the National Gallery of Art

https://nga.demo.mixedbread.com/
116•breadislove•14h ago•31 comments

Show HN: A Digital Twin of my coffee roaster that runs in the browser

https://autoroaster.com/
105•jvkoch•4d ago•31 comments

Lánczos Interpolation Explained (2022)

https://mazzo.li/posts/lanczos.html
130•tobr•6d ago•8 comments

A Molecular Motor Minimizes Energy Waste

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/167
14•lc0_stein•2d ago•1 comments

Automated code reviews via mutation testing

https://github.com/mbj/mutant
10•mooreds•4d ago•0 comments

OpenGL: Mesh shaders in the current year

https://www.supergoodcode.com/mesh-shaders-in-the-current-year/
152•pjmlp•23h ago•107 comments

HATEOAS for Haunted Houses

https://www.sanfordtech.xyz/posts/hateoas-for-haunted-houses/
32•recursivedoubts•2d ago•6 comments

Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/10/ryanair-flight-landed-at-manchester-airport-with...
644•mazokum•20h ago•484 comments

ThalamusDB: Query text, tables, images, and audio

https://github.com/itrummer/thalamusdb
32•itrummer•3d ago•5 comments

After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/after-nine-years-of-grinding-replit-finally-found-its-market-ca...
131•toomanyrichies•5d ago•109 comments

Hardware Stockholm Syndrome

https://programmingsimplicity.substack.com/p/hardware-stockholm-syndrome
80•rajiv_abraham•4d ago•31 comments

In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

https://iai.tv/articles/in-a-post-truth-world-truth-seeking-is-more-important-than-ever-auid-3382
33•benvanderbeek•12h ago•13 comments

Show HN: Lights Out: my 2D Rubik's Cube-like Game

https://raymondtana.github.io/projects/pages/Lights_Out.html
65•raymondtana•1d ago•22 comments

Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously

https://feelingof.com/episodes/078/
12•strombolini•3d ago•2 comments

Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems

https://alew.is/lava.html
134•OneLessThing•1d ago•147 comments

Verge Genomics (YC S15) Is Hiring for Multiple Engineering and Product Roles

1•alicexzhang•12h ago
Open in hackernews

HTML's Best Kept Secret: The Output Tag

https://denodell.com/blog/html-best-kept-secret-output-tag
214•todsacerdoti•3h ago

Comments

eps•2h ago
Apparently, it's about screen reader support in web pages.

Also "ARIA" stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications and it's "a set of HTML attributes that make web content more accessible to people with disabilities."

skrebbel•2h ago
This is like explaining what JavaScript is under a post about React. There’s no shame in not knowing accessibility basics, but there’s also no need to act like it’s ridiculous to expect the reader to know some.
akk0•1h ago
I think "act like it's ridiculous" is pretty hyperbolic here. I didn't know what ARIA stood for until now (though I knew what it was).

You'd be surprised how many people barely know it exists... I was a TA for my uni's Web Engineering and Ethics in CS courses and accessibility never even came up in either course.

froobius•2h ago
So there's useful html tags from 2008 that no one uses or knows about... How can that be the case? Because there's just so many tags? Because people don't read the docs? Because the benefits are not obvious?
j45•2h ago
In some cases, because there was a period of time where it might not have been in HTML in all browsers, and javascript was used instead, and then HTML had it.

Then no one checked, and the javascript train had already left the station.

atoav•2h ago
My guess would be that most people just copy (mimic) what is already there. I sometimes work as a freelance web administrator and I can assure you 95% of people who create websites for a living have never read through a list of HTML tags, have only a slight idea of the semantic web and in the end they are more like people who cobble existing things together and are out of their depth pretty quickly.

Not that this is problematic per se, everybodies milage may vary and we're all out there to learn. But if I told one of them about the output tag thry probably wouldn't even understand why that would be important.

Timwi•2h ago
People who already have a habit of solving a problem a specific way are generally unlikely to switch when a new solution appears unless it is considerably easier. If it's not immediately easier, it will feel easier to continue the ingrained habit.
gregoriol•2h ago
Maybe because most HTML tags are not well supported by browsers, because they are doing by themselves only half of what a developer would want, hard to style, hard to enhance the native behavior, ... most recently-added tags have those problems (ex: <progress>), this one from 2008 is an even better example
em-bee•46m ago
please elaborate, how is <output> a better example for only doing half of what a developer would want? what is missing?
ReptileMan•2h ago
I mean with modern javascript/dom manipulation tools the only tag you really need is div.

In before comments - not advocating for div only development, just that the nature of www moved from html with some js to well ... only js.

1718627440•1h ago
Then you might as well use a single instance of the canvas tag.
vaylian•2h ago
Because a lot of web frontend developers are addicted to <div> soup and fancy CSS and JavaScript libraries.
grumbel•1h ago
It's also due to browser not doing anything useful with the additional tags, if I use <article>, <section> or <div> doesn't make any difference, my browser doesn't use that to generate a TOC or let me open an <article> in a new Tab. Even the, in theory, incredible useful <time> tag seems to be completely invisible to my browser and many other potentialy useful tags don't exist in the first place (e.g. <unit> would be useful).
kitd•1h ago
Maybe not the browser itself, but in combination with semantic CSS [1], it's incredibly useful.

[1] - eg https://picocss.com/

1718627440•1h ago
Yes, I think that is what browser should spend money on instead of inventing new syntax. Google Chrome still doesn't support alternate stylesheets. But I refuse to not use them simply because a rich company can't be bothered to implement decades old standards.
Devasta•2h ago
Because no one cares about HTML except as a payload carrier for the real website: the JavaScript output from React/Tailwind/Typescript compilation.

You have to remember, this is an industry that thinks having code without syntax errors was too unreasonable a requirement for XHTML, there is no reason to expect them to know anything beyond div and maybe a dozen other tags.

meindnoch•1h ago
Most sites today are not using HTML in the way it was originally envisioned. They use something called "DHTML" instead. The D stands for DIV, because people seldom use any other tag. E.g. in normal HTML you would use the TABLE, TR and TD tags to build a table. In modern DHTML (aka DIV-HTML) people build the table from fixed size DIVs, and calculate the column sizes via JavaScript.
asjo•1h ago
The D in DHTML is usually short for "Dynamic".

Around the time that abbreviation became fashionable using a lot of DIV elements also did, but that wasn't what the "D" stood for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML

1718627440•1h ago
I think that was known by meindnoch and was a joke.
bapak•42m ago
Please delete this comment. If you're being sarcastic, this is not obvious at all to people who don't know.
1718627440•1h ago
For anybody wondering, there are 112 of them:

    a
    abbr
    address
    area
    article
    aside
    audio
    b
    base
    bdi
    bdo
    blockquote
    body
    br
    button
    canvas
    caption
    cite
    code
    col
    colgroup
    data
    datalist
    dd
    del
    details
    dfn
    dialog
    div
    dl
    dt
    em
    embed
    fieldset
    figcaption
    figure
    footer
    form
    h1
    h2
    h3
    h4
    h5
    h6
    head
    header
    hgroup
    hr
    html
    i
    iframe
    img
    input
    ins
    kbd
    label
    legend
    li
    link
    main
    map
    mark
    menu
    meta
    meter
    nav
    noscript
    object
    ol
    optgroup
    option
    output
    p
    picture
    pre
    progress
    q
    rp
    rt
    ruby
    s
    samp
    script
    search
    section
    select
    slot
    small
    source
    span
    strong
    style
    sub
    summary
    sup
    table
    tbody
    td
    template
    textarea
    tfoot
    th
    thead
    time
    title
    tr
    track
    u
    ul
    var
    video
    wbr
b_e_n_t_o_n•39m ago
> Update 7 Oct 2025: Some screen readers have been found not to announce updates to the tag, so explicitly emphasising the role attribute might be worthwhile for now until support improves: <output role="status">.

Maybe it's because like most things html/css related, it's a semi-broken implementation of a half-feature?

chrismorgan•2h ago
I came to this article expecting to see <output> misused, and was pleasantly surprised. :-)

(Actually, the dodgy GenAI calculator image at the top primed me for even more failure, making the excellent content that followed even more surprising. But I soon forgot about it and only remembered when I scrolled back to the start for no particular reason when done.)

Nevermark•1h ago
> the dodgy GenAI calculator image

It appears human beings are already forgetting the even more dodgy images some of us created before AI allowed us to reduce said dodginess. Or actually get a picture we could post without too much shame. :)

And in this case, IMHO, the image has a significant amount of dodgy vintage tech charm.

Not every use of AI replaces a professional artist.

Kudos•1h ago
> Not every use of AI replaces a professional artist.

It normalises it.

uonr•48m ago
I love those handmade bad sketch
aruggirello•23m ago
This dodgy GenAI calculator is funny... You can only add, multiply and divide. No subtractions allowed!
austin-cheney•2h ago
I can see this having extreme value 20 years ago. Then it could take more than a minute to asynchronously get data back and you needed to tell people what content on the page changed.

Now, the bottleneck is entirely the database first and the framework second. Those can be switched if the framework code is extra garbage. When those are taken out of the equation I am seeing text update to the screen in about 5-15ms in response to a user interaction that requires execution on the localhost server, 45ms for networked server.

At that speed you don’t need to alert the user of any content changes. You only need to structure the content such that walking the DOM, using a screen reader, from point of interaction to area of output is direct and logical, expected, for a human.

arccy•1h ago
these days with llms we're back to over a minute to get a response...
NoahZuniga•2h ago
> Update 7 Oct 2025: Some screen readers have been found not to announce updates to the tag, so explicitly emphasising the role attribute might be worthwhile for now until support improves: <output role="status">.

Waiting for support to improve on a 17 year old tag that is barely used anymore?

croes•1h ago
To improve the usage of screen readers that don’t respect a tag that’s parts of the standard for 17 years.

It’s obviously the screen readers fault.

egeozcan•34m ago
If on Windows, opening tickets on NVDA repo works wonderfully well, as long as they find them valid.

https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda

lelandfe•1h ago
> Like <label>, <output> has a for="" attribute. Here you list the ids of any <input> elements the result depends on

Any screen reader users able to comment on whether this is worth doing? I suspect this would be such a rarity online that screen reader users wouldn’t be familiar with it, but it depends on the UX of the software

pbhjpbhj•35m ago
If you have to use `role=status` to make it work with screenreaders, I'm not sure I see the point.

Maybe I'm jaded, I was all in on semantic xhtml and microformats before we got HTML5, but this seems like being overly-pedantic for the sake of pedantry rather than for a11y.

rglullis•32m ago
Chicken-and-egg. As soon as more websites start using the tag, screenreaders will catch up and role=status will not be needed.
andai•22m ago
>When I searched GitHub public repos, it barely showed up at all.

Is there a way to search by code?

Etheryte•19m ago
That's literally what search does on Github?