A sewing page that never closed its font size HTML tags

4 minutes ago by dang

Past threads:

This website has a lot of unclosed h3 tags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7351838 - March 2014 (132 comments)

Don't forget to close your HTML tags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5194843 - Feb 2013 (11 comments)

36 minutes ago by ljp_206

I have this page backed up personally on my machine. I love it so dearly, whenever I find myself scrolling through it again I always end up cackling with laughter.

2 hours ago by tdeck

There is a StackOverflow thread about this page and why it may have looked OK in older browsers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14787255/why-are-unclose...

an hour ago by jjice

I haven't thought about styling tags like `<center>` and `<font>` in quite some time, and I'm glad for it. CSS is quite the wonder and I'll never talk bad about it again after this reminder.

39 minutes ago by echelon

I miss the old web, because we had vision and dreams for grander technology back then.

Bolted on design took a front seat, but it shouldn't have been our focus.

Open-ended CSS enabled us to reinvent styling and designs over and over and over. We've spent countless hours as a species grappling with how to present information, and how to reinvent the wheel. (Every brand needs to feel special, every company needs a design system.)

If these hours had been spent on semantics and reusability, we might have arrived at a different future. Perhaps rich document sharing rather than a web that's about who can have the fanciest scrolling upvote attention grabbers.

There were some bold ideas in the semantic web, microformats, RSS/RDF. Imagine sharing news and articles like P2P, insightful comments being ranked and scored, interest graphs being cultivated to better you rather than get you to like/subscribe. Platforms as an open and extensible standard.

CSS, meanwhile, is a tool that's being used to position a smiling alien creature that tells you to log into the mobile version.

We focused on the wrong things and evolved in the wrong direction. Shiny and flashy distracted us from rigor and enlightenment.

3 hours ago by SquibblesRedux

The obvious solution to the web page's problem appears at the bottom of the page:

"If a problem persists, we recommend that you contact Sewing and Embroidery Warehouse"

3 hours ago by kijin

Yeah, that footer looks surprisingly normal. But I don't see a whole bunch of closing tags just above that part. Why did the font size suddenly revert to normal? Is there something that means "reset everything"?

an hour ago by ascom

FWIW this website appears normal in Internet Explorer compatibility mode (i.e. IE7 mode).

You'll probably have to jump through hoops to actually get it to open in Windows 10 though...

8 hours ago by rasz

nested H3 tags with:

    h3 {
        font-size: 1.17em;

"(historically the em unit was derived from the width of a capital "M" in a given typeface.). The numeric value acts as a multiplier of the font-size property of the element on which it is used."

So this used to work and look normal.

3 hours ago by makeworld

Another dilemma for website archival, then. It'd be cool the Internet Archive came up with some JS shim to render websites how they were supposed to look.

an hour ago by dredmorbius

Archive.is seems to handle that case pretty well.

(Enough so that if I find a website with JS required, I'll usually defer first to opening it in Archive.is, though of late the endless CAPTCHAs are somewhat chilling the enthusiasm of that.)

3 hours ago by yjftsjthsd-h

To make sure I'm following: It used to be an absolute size and got changed to relative?

2 hours ago by Rumudiez

That is not correct. The em unit has always behaved with respect to the inherited font size. If your body has font-size: 16px; then a child with font-size: 1.5em; would appear the same as using 24px for the value. This can recur with nesting, so that 24 could become 36 with another layer added. The rem (root em) unit solves this “problem” as it’s always relative to the document root (usually the font-size you’ve set to html/body)

5 hours ago by armchairhacker

There are 1.86 billion websites online right now, many more that used to be online, and over 1.2 million TB data. Probably a lot of it is generic content or machine-generated, but I wonder how many unique, weird sites there are like this.