deprecated tags in Wilbur & Cougar -Reply

>>> Arne Knudson <ack@ebt.com> 07/31/96 10:36am >>>
>     I fail to see that reasoning behind re-incorporating the deprecated font
>tags, like <U>, back into the DTDs. I thought that way back during the
>HTML 2.0 draft discussions, it was decided that <U> was rather evil, because so
>many browsers used underline to represent links.

That's a browser-implementation problem.  I've been using 
<U>, and in MSIE and Mosaic it improves the appearance of 
documents.

Only using bold and italics gets less meaningful (because 
the appearance is used for EM and STRONG) and downright
boring.  The more varied types of documents I write, the 
more I notice that their aren't enough tags to markup 
all of the types of information that are in web documents.
(The discussion about <phone> brings up a good example.)

Also, if I remember my high school English correctly, things 
like book titles are supposed to be underlined according 
to many style guides.

I don't think people will get confused in well-written 
documents, and besides, it would look better if browsers
implemented raised text (ala UDI-WWW) as links anyway.

Until non-CSS-compliant browsers disappear, I think it's
premature to drop <U>.

>     I think that <U> should be removed from the DTD. Perhaps, with the changes
to
>browsers, that re-visiting the debate over <U> may be worthwhile, but I think
we
>should strongly discourage people from using it.
>
>-Arne
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 31 July 1996 17:47:58 UTC