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A100225: CSS Style Sheets Alternatives to Deprecated HTML Tags.

It may be hard to believe, but certain commonly used HTML tags have been deprecated! The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has now revised the HTML 4.0 standard to deprecate several display tags: basefont, center, font, s, strike, and u.

So what is going on? The use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), usually referred to as style sheets, is now exerting a major influence in the coding of Web pages. Style sheets offer an improvement over the traditional HTML-only Web document by easily separating the formatting/display-characteristics of a page from its content. The site content is still described using standard HTML tags, but style sheets should now be used to create an appearance and presentation for the site.

Therefore, the Guru strongly recommends that you start now to regularly use CSS. Fortunately, style sheets are very easy to code.

In the following table, we show how to replace these deprecated HTML tags with style sheets. We also display text that shows how to relate the HTML font size attribute to the CSS font-size property.

HTML Tag	Style
<center>	style="text-align:center"
<font color="blue">	style="color:blue"
<font face="courier">	style="font-family:courier"
<font size="1">	style="font-size:10px"
<font size="2">	style="font-size:12px"
<font size="3">	style="font-size:16px"
<font size="4">	style="font-size:19px" ^Netscape style="font-size:18px" ^{Internet Explorer}
<font size="5">	style="font-size:24px"
<font size="6">	style="font-size:32px"
<font size="7">	style="font-size:48px"
~~<s>strikethrough</s>~~	style="text-decoration:line-through"
~~<strike>strikethrough</strike>~~	style="text-decoration:line-through"
<u>underline</u>	style="text-decoration:underline"

The Guru