Expression® Web Design Blog - Deprecated HTML Tags

Deprecated HTML Tags

Friday, April 03, 2009

Hypertext Markup Language, better known as HTML, has come a long way since the 1980's. Back then, HTML was basically the only way to help control background / colors / font information / layout, etc. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) came into play as webmasters needed a better way to style / layout their websites. Web sites grew from a few pages to hundreds, if not thousands, of web pages. Changing the font color of a header element became a tedious task. However, with CSS, webmasters could change the information on one page, and that change would immediately show up on all pages that were attached to that style sheet.

Over the years, CSS has replaced a lot of HTML elements. Some of the deprecated HTML elements are:

<applet>
<basefont>
<center>
<dir>
<s>
<strike>

Probably one of the biggest change that affected webmasters was the element being deprecated. (Keep in mind that even though the element is deprecated, browsers still support its use though.)

FrontPage was notorious for abusing the element. Any change that you made to the text through FrontPage would result the being placed in the HTML source code. Every new paragraph would have these elements in there, creating a nightmare for webmasters when the font family or size needed to be replaced. An example would be something like:

<p><font color="#800000" size="4" face="Arial">Lorem ipsum</font></p>

As you can see, FrontPage (even its latest 2003 version), never had the size correct. Of course, webmasters could do a find and replace in the HTML source code, but every so often, FrontPage might switch the attributes around and some code might be skipped.

By using a style sheet though, you can style all the text that is contained in the element very simply by adding: