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HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition
book

HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

by Chuck Musciano, Bill Kennedy
October 2006
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
680 pages
21h 44m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

HTML's Obsolete Expanded Font Handling

In earlier versions of this book, we rejoiced that HTML version 3.2 had introduced a font-handling model for richer, more versatile text displays. When HTML 4 deprecated these special font-handling tags, we nonetheless included them in the same prominent position within this chapter because they were still part of the HTML 3.2 standard and were still very popular with HTML authors, besides being well supported by all the popular browsers. We could not do the same for this edition of the book.

Like many deprecated HTML tags and attributes, the expanded font-handling tags of HTML 3.2 were here yesterday and are gone today. Internet Explorer, the world's most popular browser, displays all of them; other browsers display some, but not other font-related tags. Accordingly, we include the Extended Font Model tags in this chapter, but at the end of this chapter and with all the implicit red flags waving hard.

The W3C wants authors to use CSS, not acute tags and attributes, for explicit control of the font styles, colors, and sizes of the text characters. That's why these extended font tags and related attributes have fallen into disfavor. It's now time for you to eschew the extended font tags, too.

The Extended Font Size Model

Instead of absolute point values, the Extended Font Model of HTML 3.2 uses a relative means for sizing fonts. Sizes range from 1, the smallest, to 7, the largest; the default (base) font size is 3.

It is almost impossible to state ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596527322Errata Page