I think a one line comment about font tags hardly qualifies as trashing a web page. I would rather talk about Perl, so I tried to be brief and non-threatening. *sigh*
Added after reply: Not that I have a problem with user agents dropping the font tag thereby "trashing" the page, but it seems like a red herring to worry about that-- none of the larger web client projects lack support for it. I'm suggesting the web designer or CGI applications being written now stop using deprecated tags. Simple. That's the whole point of them being deprecated.
It doesn't sound to me like you've researched CSS at all. If you'd look at it, you'd know that for you inline style addicts you can easily put the actual CSS into the
<head> section of your document (or anywhere else in the document for that matter).
I remember when HTML 2.0 was the standard too. I also remember when I had to program fonts bit-by-bit into my dot matrix printer. Heck, I remember when we had to change the daisy wheel on the TTY to get a different font.
</stroll-down-memory-lane> How does that affect solid programming technique?
CSS is a concept that is being sensibly borrowed for use on the web from a much older discipline known as typesetting. Even PageMaker 2.0 in 1988 had style sheets. Inline font directives are inefficient. If you want to change a consistent style you will be wrestling with search and replace throughout your document. If you must hardcode the style into HTML, at least don't repeat that inefficiency in your Perl.
my $start_smalltext = '<font size="-1">';
my $stop_smalltext = '</font>';
This way if I'm reusing your code, and don't want to use size as a display differentiator, I can easily change to use a color, or any other acceptable font attribute.
I'm not saying these things because I am some blind standard lover. I'm saying these things because you have better things to do with your time than fiddle with trivial bits of code any time you want to make a global change.