WEEKLY WHINE

You're so deprecated

HTML went through some changes a while back. In DEC 1997, HTML was modified to version 4.0. This version brought multimedia, accessibility, and language-oriented changes to HTML. Most important was the push in favor of style sheets.

Several tags, like <CENTER>, <FONT>, and even <U>, were "deprecated". They could still be used in HTML, but they are being phased out. The W3C thinks that style sheets are better and more useful.

Style sheets are these things that allow you to tell how text should be formatted, where it should be located, what language it is in, and a variety of random settings for formatting. They're quite complex, perhaps needlessly so. Even so, there are a lot of things you can do with them.

So why are they so hard to support? Reportedly Netscape 6's support for Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] is all but impeccable. The trouble is, Netscape 6 is buggy. It's hard to make it work properly. Other popular browsers include IE5, IE4, and Netscape 4. Netscape 4 is notorious for handling CSS badly. You could load a page in Netscape, see what it looked like, and then get a completely different result in IE4. Believe me. Netscape seemed to ignore style sheet specifications for certain elements but not for others, and I couldn't figure out why.

IE4 and IE5 seem to have fairly good support for style sheets, in that you would give them specifications for something and the result would be what you expected.

So now, you're not supposed to use the <FONT> element. The trouble is that it's still the easiest and most convenient way, for example, to set the text to an arbitrary size or color. If you want to do that with style sheets, you'll need the <SPAN> element. For example, <FONT SIZE=5> should become <SPAN STYLE="font-size: large"> or some such nonsense.

How did this come about? When did, for example, <FONT> come into existence, and why was it added? It was included in HTML 3.2 as a way to make text change color or size. There was no mention of its expected demise, even though cascading style sheets were already in development. Indeed, HTML 3.2 called for the <STYLE> element, although the CLASS and STYLE attributes, which make style sheets useful in the first place, were not mentioned.

At this time, the W3C was already working on style sheets as a method to outline formatting for entire documents and for parts of documents. So why was the <FONT> element included when it seemed likely to be superseded? Did they expect the problems that some browsers have had with style sheets and include an alternate way to specify formatting? Or did they just include it as an interim method while CSS was not yet ready? My research shows that the latter was more likely. Nonetheless, since HTML 3.2, the <FONT> tag has become so popular that many people, like me, are going to have a tough time giving it up, especially as there's so much trouble with style sheets.

One of the most irritating problems with style sheets that I've found in Netscape 4 is that you have to turn some attributes off explicitly. For example, if you set your <H1> elements to appear in boldface, you have to tell whatever comes after them not to be bold. I don't see how this came about. Is this a feature in Netscape 4? If so, it seems kind of dumb. Is it a bug? I've used Netscape versions ranging from 4.0 all the way to 4.7, and the same thing happens in all of them. If it is a bug, why didn't anybody do anything about it?

The point is that the W3C rushed into style sheets. The justification for doing so is that HTML is not intended to specify text formatting, font sizes, and the like. This was an error in the creation of HTML, and as a result of this error, we now have an issue of overlapping languages on the Web. On a website in which formatting is needed, you've got to jump to a different language to provide that formatting. We have this linear superposition of two different programming languages that always have to be used together.

The W3C is now trying to get people to use XHTML, a new type of HTML based upon the new Extensible Markup Language rather than the Standard Generalized Markup Language that was the basis of regular HTML. Where HTML allowed you to do nearly anything, including leave out closing tags and put things wherever you like, XHTML is stricter. What is worse, CSS has different rules for HTML and XML documents. XHTML, however, is both. Depending upon how the XHTML document is supposed to be applied, you might get different results. I don't expect that the problems will be very drastic, but there are still too many languages and not enough time.