Preserved Topic: Here's a stupid basic HTML question... (Page 1 of 1)

Someone know why 3WC decided to depricate width and height in <td> tags? And background? And the <font> tag? Are they completely stupid?

Yes, I know most of that can be done in CSS; but currently browser support for CSS sucks.

"No one's going to give you a map; you've got to walk your own path." = Hot Ice Hilda, Outlaw Star.

Deprecation isn't something that's done when a feature stops being used. It's done to make people stop using the feature.

CSS has been around since 1996, and current browser support for it is actually pretty good. Even old netscape 4 recognizes font-related CSS properties, so font tags at the least are completely unnecessary at this point. Same thing with background properties. There *are* some CSS formatting things that browsers don't support, and occasionally some deprecated HTML tags and attributes may be necessary. But the solution isn't to say "let's not use the new stuff because it doesn't work perfectly"; we need to push forward. Because I don't know about you, but when table tricks are no longer necessary, I won't be looking back.

New browsers understand CSS?

Then why won't IE display my stuff right? It's syntatically correct.

"No one's going to give you a map; you've got to walk your own path." - Hot Ice Hilda, Outlaw Star.

CSS problem? Post a link and/or code in the alphabet soup forum (XHTML CSS yada yada) and we'll take a stab at troubleshooting it.

I'd say the newest browsers understand 70% or so of CSS 2. The stuff they don't understand is the complicated stuff. Browsers that aren't really new understand 40-50% of it, I think. Those are very rough estimates. But look at www.zeldman.com or www.alistapart.com - they're almost entirely CSS based, and they tend to link to lots of CSS-based sites. They all work fine.

You can't assume that everything works. You still need some workarounds here and there, though they're usually not as messy as most HTML workarounds.

Please do post a troublesome page or two; perhaps you're merely making a silly mistake somewhere that's making IE not understand.

Even some logical and well-reasoned mistakes can do that, in fact.