Deprecated Elements in HTML

HTML is one of those things that just, well, happened. Many people have contributed their expertise over the years version after version. Sometimes the tags and attributes were well thought out, and occasionally various companies forced their own special options on the web community. The result is a hodgepodge of well-defined features combined with obscure, barely understood and little known elements.

The newer specifications and proposals from the W3C attempt to deal with this randomity by proposing that many of the tags and attributes be declined out of the language. The argument is that better ways have been defined and the older tags and attributes should be removed. 

Sometimes depreciating tags makes sense. For example, the <FONT> tag is exceptionally awkward and restrictive. Style sheets allow you to accomplish everything that <FONT> could only with orders of magnitude of more features.

Some of the depreciated tags are listed below.

In addition to tags, several attributes (modifiers to tags which set specific behaviors) are depreciated. These are listed in the table below.

If you are creating a new web site, it's a good idea to use only HTML 4.0 tags and attributes. In fact, the smart move is to keep an eye on the standards committees and always work your site towards the standard. This way it will (usually) be the most cross-browser and cross-operating system compliant. It can be assumed that all browsers will support at least the HTML 4.0 tags and attributes.

Another thing to learn is Cascading Style Sheets. These elements are distinctly different from standard HTML in format and usage. HTML defines what goes on a page and more-or-less where that data is to be placed. CSS defines how the information is to be displayed.

You will, however, need to learn HTML coding yourself to be fully standards compliant. Editors such as FrontPage do not create HTML 4.0 compliant code, and, in fact, you can never really be positive what these editors will create (especially when versions change).

What will happen if you use depreciated tags? Since literally billions of pages have already been created on the web, it's a sure bet that support for these tags and attributes will remain in the browsers for a long time to come (perhaps they will never be removed). Thus, it's fairly safe to use a <b> or <blockquote> here and there.