Chapter 21. Formatting: The Old Way
Back in the days when CSS was still poorly supported by most browsers, most folks controlled the appearance of the text in their Web pages with HTML elements. Partly due to the browser wars—and the balkanization of the Web that ensued—and partly because of the push towards CSS and XHTML, the W3C decided to deprecate a number of formatting elements, that is, to mark them for eventual removal from the standard (X)HTML specifications.
Still, it has been a bit like locking the chicken coop after the fox has gotten inside; most of the pages on the Web today already use one or more of the deprecated tags. While CSS is more powerful, more efficient, and easier to update, for most people, (X)HTML is still easier to understand ...
Get HTML for the World Wide Web, Fifth Edition, with XHTML and CSS now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
