Re: Comments on Cougar DTD (fwd)

> Once upon a time Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet shaped the electrons to say...
> >May I add that we mark FONT and CENTER as deprecated, and remove the
> >FACE attribute for FONT altogether? With the support for style sheets
> 1. I will still argue that FONT as in the DTD is not bad

I think FONT should be tagged as a depreciated alias for SPAN, and
have that functionality folded into it. For reasons, see below.

> 2. CENTER is *way* too widespread to ever leave the spec, why bother
> deprecating it when it is just the same thing as <div align=center> anyway.
> Is there some problem with having an alias like that?

Yes. It adds a little extra weight to applications that are already
bloated. One of those isn't a bad thing. But once you've got one,
there's a strong temptation to add yet more, and they do add up.

What's really needed is a facility to let the user add such aliases on
a per-document basis. Real SGML entities would do the trick, but
nobody implements those  yet.

> 3. You *never* just drop tags from one release to the next

Right. That's why you tag them as depreciated. So authors will be
encouraged to NOT use them, and there is some chance that they will go
away in the future. Authors of heavy, feature-overladen browsers
can/will implement them so you can use them on legacy documents if you
need them.

	<mike

Received on Thursday, 18 July 1996 13:31:29 UTC