Let's talk about depreciated HTML tags. This is my Throwback Thursday topic from the last time I told you about a few depreciated HTML tags to avoid.
The HTML language is currently in its 5th incarnation, as in HTML5. Prior to Cascading Style Sheets, aka CSS, we had to use formatting features built into the HTML code, like <font> and <big> and <center>. Now we use CSS to format how a web page looks.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops the open standards of how HTML will function. They come up with the new ideas that are supposed to make the internet better. It's up to the web browser companies to follow the standards, and no one follows them completely.
As HTML improvements are made, we also see some older HTML tags being removed from the standard. Web browsers still understand them, but you should not be using them.
Here are a few depreciated tags that you should not be using:
| HTML Tag | CSS Equivalent |
| <font> | font-family:font name |
| <center> | text-align:center |
| <big> | font-size:value |
| <b> | font-weight:bold |
| <u> | font-style:italic |
| <frame> | -- |
In addition to those specific few tags, we also have limitations on what tag attributes we can use. Here are some that no longer work:
| HTML Attribute | CSS Equivalent |
| align | text-align:right/left/center |
| background | background-image:url(image) |
| bgcolor | background-color:#hexvalue |
| hspace | padding:value |
| vspace | padding:value |
| size | font-size:value |
You can look at a complete list of obsolete tags and attributes here.
Browser Support
Although there are a lot of fancy new features in HTML5, I caution against using them all because none of the web browsers fully support the standard yet. You can see how well the popular web browsers are supporting the HTML5 standard by visiting this page.
That pages shows tabs for desktop, tablet, and mobile browsers. You should look at all three.
It's no surprise that Chrome is leading the way for HTML5 support, but you might be surprised to see Opera is in 2nd place for all platforms too. Opera? Really? Opera's usage is way lower than anyone else; take a look here.
Although HTML5 has a lot of cool features, you should cross reference the browser usage on your website and avoid using any HTML5 tags that your customers won't see. On one hand, it's nice to use cutting edge features on your website, but they won't do you any good if people can't see them.
