Re: <big> and <s>

Anne van Kesteren wrote:

 [Lynx] 
> not obvious to me why it did not ignore <big> and <small>.

I can't tell you more about it, but I was fascinated that
<small><big><big> BIG </big></big></small> was rendered
like <big> BIG </big>.  

> There was a use case for <small> but not for <big>.

Okay, I've used <small> in very rare cases where I wanted a 
"visible" effect for browsers / devices not supporting CSS,
but I don't recall a single case where I used <big> (apart
from the mentioned test).

While we are at it, I often use <tt> when I am too lazy to 
decide if it's actually <code> or similar, or when a <pre>
doesn't work as expected (a Wikipedia issue).  When you try
to deprecate <tt> while keeping <i> and <b> it is another
"not so obvious" decision.

Getting rid of <u> because cheap devices could desperately
need this visual (or whatever) effect for links and nothing
else is fine.  But HTML5 is obviously not designed for cheap
devices, and maybe HTML5 has other reasons to stick to this
HTML4 deprecation of <u>.

>> Similarly all old (pre HTML 4) browsers I've ever used
>> supported <s>, but not <del>.  IIRC at least one XHTML-
>> based specification doesn't include the "edit-module".
>> (Admittedly it also doesn't include the legacy-module)

> Well, we're fixing that now, not? :-)

You can't fix my old browsers, therefore I guess you mean
"XHTML print".  That has a DTD, and HTML5 doesn't know what
a DTD is, HTML5 is "tag soup reloaded", isn't it ?  <gd&r>

> Are such browsers still used?

FWIW I used Netscape 3 until summer 2007, on a box where
the harddisk space was what modern systems offer as RAM.
It limits the browser choices, no "Opera Mini" for OS/2 :-) 

 Frank

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2008 17:15:06 UTC