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
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Canvas Image Conversion

    At last week's Mozilla WebDev Offsite, we all spent half of the last day hacking on our future Mozilla Marketplace app. One mobile app that recently got a lot of attention was Instagram, which sold to Facebook for the bat shit crazy price of one...

  • By
    MooTools Zebra Table Plugin

    I released my first MooTools class over a year ago. It was a really minimalistic approach to zebra tables and a great first class to write. I took some time to update and improve the class. The XHTML You may have as many tables as...

Discussion

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