Re: opinions on deprecated code plus

> 2. It is still necessary or maybe easier to use deprecated codes,
> particular attributes, at times to get pages to display correctly
> since style sheets do not always produce the desired results.

One has to distinguish between two cases here:

- style sheets don't produce the desired results because the browser
  implementation is broken - this is I think the reason for the exception;

- style sheets don't produce the desired results because the desired 
  results require a level of presentation control that HTML is not intended
  to deliver - in this case, either work within the spirit of HTML, or use
  something, like PDF, whose design rationale is tight presentation control.

Note that broken implementations are a particular problem because well
structured HTML is usable without presentational features, but can become
unusable if presentational features are implemented in broken ways.  NS4
has poisoned CSS by making the fallback be broken presentation rather than
default browser presentation.

> The reason that I bring up the depricated attributes issue is
> that the "bgcolor", "align", and "width" attributes are used on most

bgcolor and align are absolutely deprecated.  I suspect that even some of
the uses of width are only un-deprecated because the corresponding CSS
feature was not introduced until CSS2.

> web pages and most people don't realize that they've been depricated
> for certain elements.  I think that the guideline is quite clear that

Most people are not aware that anything has been deprecated.  Most people
call elements tags and one, off topic, question on the www-html list called
attributes tags!

> you can't use these attributes, but there's probably not any impact
> on accessibility if you do.

At worst, the impact is probably no worse than misuse of the equivalent
CSS (e.g. poor colour contrasts, references to the colour of text to identify
it, etc.).  However, their use tends to be symptomatic of tag soup page
construction, although style attributes, id selectors and authoring tools
whose user interface gives the appearance that presentational features are
being applied directly to the text, have the same problem.

Received on Sunday, 18 February 2001 06:01:11 UTC