Less "best kept secret" more "not very useful so nobody cared to learn about it".
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
48 points (96.2% liked)
Web Development
4714 readers
48 users here now
Welcome to the web development community! This is a place to post, discuss, get help about, etc. anything related to web development
What is web development?
Web development is the process of creating websites or web applications
Rules/Guidelines
- Follow the programming.dev site rules
- Keep content related to web development
- If what you're posting relates to one of the related communities, crosspost it into there to help them grow
- If youre posting an article older than two years put the year it was made in brackets after the title
Related Communities
- !html@programming.dev
- !css@programming.dev
- !uiux@programming.dev
- !a11y@programming.dev
- !react@programming.dev
- !vuejs@programming.dev
- !webassembly@programming.dev
- !javascript@programming.dev
- !typescript@programming.dev
- !nodejs@programming.dev
- !astro@programming.dev
- !angular@programming.dev
- !tauri@programming.dev
- !sveltejs@programming.dev
- !pwa@programming.dev
Wormhole
Some webdev blogs
Not sure what to post in here? Want some web development related things to read?
Heres a couple blogs that have web development related content
- https://frontendfoc.us/ - [RSS]
- https://wesbos.com/blog
- https://davidwalsh.name/ - [RSS]
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/
- https://sia.codes/posts/ - [RSS]
- https://www.smashingmagazine.com/ - [RSS]
- https://www.bennadel.com/ - [RSS]
- https://web.dev/ - [RSS]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Nearly every web app that uses an input calculates and displays some result based on those inputs. It's clearly useful.
You can do that with a div. Its only use is slightly improved default accessibility behaviour.
Yes exactly. Which is reason enough to use it, unless you purposefully want worse accessibility.
You could make the same argument about p, h1 - h6, label, etc.
All those other elements give some benefit apart from accessibility which is why they are universally used and output isn't.
Expecting all devs to test their sites with screen readers is unrealistic.
Expecting all devs to test their sites with screen readers is unrealistic.
I disagree with this but its not what we're talking about. You said output is useless and I'm saying its obviously not. There's zero cost to using it instead of a div so the only reason not to use it is to purposefully screw users who need accessibility features.
All those other elements give some benefit apart from accessibility
Maybe for label but p and h1 - h6 only differ from div in styles, which is another argument in my favor. If you're willing to swap a div for one of those for visual users, swapping a div for output should be just as easy of a change.
You said output is useless
No I said it's not very useful.
There’s zero cost to using it instead of a div so the only reason not to use it is to purposefully screw users who need accessibility features.
No, the main reason is because people don't know about it, because it's an extra thing to remember for little benefit. Same reason other semantic-only tags like article get very little use.
only differ from div in styles
Err yeah the "only" do a really useful thing that lots of people want.
If output came with some nice styling and maybe animations... maybe a built in copy-to-clipboard option... then people would have used it.
the main reason is because people don't know about it
But you know about it now and you're still arguing against it.
it's an extra thing to remember for little benefit the "only" do a really useful thing that lots of people want.
The benefit you see in those tags is the same level of benefit that users who use accessibility features get from output and other semantic tags. But your argument seems to boil down to "I dont need accessibility features so i don't care about enabling them for ppl who do". That's very disappointing and continuing this debate seems pointless so i'm gonna stop here
I've been writing HTML since like '98 and am just learning about this tag now.
If you prefer reading instead of watching:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/output
What do you mean by "instead of watching"? OP links to a text article.
I still prefer your MDN link though. Concise, and a more readable layout. Dunno why OP felt the need to increase the font size that much into a wide layout.
I have no idea why I thought it was a video.
htmls best kept secret; the marquee tag