22.10.2011 17:27, Jordan Clark wrote:
1. The W3C make *recommendations* – they do not “control” what
> the methods the browser companies can or cannot use to render pages.
> So, if for example, the W3C say that “the FONT element is *not* be used”
> (or “deprecated” in W3C-speak), whether developers and browser-vendors
> listen is another thing.
Indeed, but there’s more. The HTML5 drafts say that authors must not use
the FONT element, but that just means that a document using it is
non-conforming. This may matter to use if your client or boss has
required conformance to the HTML5 specification (I’m postulating that
there will be such a spec). But without such external requirements,
nobody can force authors not to use the FONT element. Well, if browsers
stopped supporting it, that would be different, but it won’t happen.
And the W3C isn’t even trying to make browser vendors drop FONT support,
for example. Quite the contrary. The HTML5 drafts require that the FONT
element be supported by browsers. They also define its meaning, even
more accurately than previous specifications—in particular, it specifies
the mapping of FONT SIZE values in HTML to font-size property values in CSS.
In addition to requiring continued to support to features declared
deprecated in HTML 4,01 (and usually non-conforming in HTML5 drafts),
the HTML5 drafts even require browser support to features that were
never part of any HTML specification but have been widely implemented
and deployed, such as <embed>.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
