Legacy String Methods for Generating HTML

By  on  

I'm always really excited to see new methods on JavaScript primitives. These additions are acknowledgement that the language needs to evolve and that we're doing exciting new things. That being said, I somehow just discovered some legacy String methods that you probably shouldn't use but have existed forever. Let's take a look!

These legacy string methods take a basic string of text and wrap it in a HTML tag of the same name:

"Hello".big() // "<big>Hello</big>"
"Hello".blink() // "<blink>Hello</blink>"
"Hello".bold() // "<b>Hello</b>"
"Hello".italics() // "<i>Hello</i>"
"Hello".link("https://davidwalsh.name") // "<a href="https://davidwalsh.name">Hello</a>"

Native prototypes don't usually remove methods and for good reason -- they can break websites! I'm shocked I didn't know about these methods before today. It's always fun to see relics of the web past though!

Recent Features

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Modal-Style Text Selection with Fokus

    Every once in a while I find a tiny JavaScript library that does something very specific, very well.  My latest find, Fokus, is a utility that listens for text selection within the page, and when such an event occurs, shows a beautiful modal dialog in...

  • By
    MooTools HTML Police: dwMarkupMarine

    We've all inherited rubbish websites from webmasters that couldn't master valid HTML. You know the horrid markup: paragraph tags with align attributes and body tags with background attributes. It's almost a sin what they do. That's where dwMarkupMarine comes in.

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!