The World Wide Web Consortium's own Cascading Style Sheets language tutorial, Adding a touch of style, written 29th August 2000 by Dave Raggett section What about browsers that don't support CSS? recommends using HTML font tags. Case dismissed.

To be depreciated means there's a newer construct, not that the depreciated construct is obsolete. To the contrary, the spec calls for user agents to continue support for deprecated elements for backward compatibility. That means depreciated constructs should enjoy wider compatability!

In the long run, obsolete constructs seem like a worse idea than the bad constructs that become obsolete, imho. If TMTOWTDI in HTML then WTFN?

First, it's "deprecated". "Depreciated" means something similar, but is mostly an accounting term these days.

Second, just because some agents support it does not mean you should continue use. The reason the w3 deprecates the tag is so that you will stop using it. The word "should" is a little loaded. If you read the w3 definition of "should" it clearly implies no real obligation on the part of the user agent to continue to use deprecated tags. It merely states that one might want to do so, in order to ease the transition from HTML3 to HTML4

Third, the newer construct is called CSS, and gets you to think about how to separate content from layout directives. It's a more orthogonal approach. Generally this is considered a Good Thing (tm).

I'm sorry I was terse. I didn't mean to detract from the fact that I think you are doing a great job getting started with the above code.

First, oops.

Second, basically trashing webpages that don't conform to the new standard rubs me wrong. It's nice to be able to separate content from layout, but it's not always needed or wanted, and shouldn't be mandatory.

I need to specify fonts in places where css isn't happening (homenodes) or where they make things more complicated than necessary. One Bad Thing^TM about css are inlines that break offline. That last sentence required a font tag.

I remember when there was no font tag. If some people have their way i expect to see css eventually done away with. When css is superceded by the latest ultra-layout concept i hope it's at least retained as still useful, and for compatability with legacy content - just one more way to do it.

I hope that we're both satisfied to have aired some views on this and that further html discussion will take place via chatterbox /msg. This node is already too huge to host such a dubious debate :-)

Update: The "trashing webpages" comment is NOT referring to criticism of this script! See below for explaination.