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<blink> is no longer supported by browsers, but with a few css declarations it works just fine. Removing support for presentational markup does not mean a loss

<blink> is no longer supported by browsers, but with a few css declarations it works just fine. Removing support for presentational markup does not mean a loss of information. Browsers will still render tags they don't recognize, and re-applying the styling of those tags is often trivial. (I mention <blink> because it's one of the more difficult, but not terribly so) As the web evolved, our needs changed. Do we still need the tag?

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I unapologetically still use the font tag, because most of the time I have no desire to bother with CSS.
- taco_emoji 9y ago
 Even inline? Blah vs. Blah
 - bzbarsky 9y ago
 Just as a nit, "font-size:10pt" is a lot worse than from an accessibility perspective. is "one notch below the user's default size". If the user sets a 20pt font, it's going to be larger than 10pt. You could use "font-size: small" to get the size="2" behavior. (Also, "font-family: Whatever", not "font-face: Whatever".)
 - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
 Note that your CSS example is longer and requires combining two different syntaxes. And for one change, the difference in length and complexity is much more apparent. > Blah vs. > Blah Which is easier to remember? Which is more obvious at a glance?
 - maemilius 9y ago
 The former. The problem is just that you've learned what the latter means better than the former. I'm the opposite. Plus, the former is an absolute value where the latter is not, as far as I've been able to tell. I know that first span will always be 10pt font. I have no idea what "2" even means in this context.
 - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
 Another commenter did you a favor and explained why using 10pt is worse than using 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927837
 reificator 9y ago
 That may be true, but regardless of whether pt is a best practice, the point remains that it is still a unit. IMO that puts it ahead of the alternative example.
 - sureaboutthis 9y ago
 pt is for print and does not translate to the web. There are articles about this, specifically from the W3C https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html
orph4nus 9y ago
I think you're missing the OP's point though. It's true that you can just use some CSS to make up for the lost HTML feature, but than again you could also rewrite the HTML part. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure that what the OP is trying to say, is that there are plenty of great websites out there, which were developed a long time ago, and for which there is no maintainer to do any work on it. Thus having HTML elements like this dropped, would make the content in a way lost. Thinking about it some more, users can probably add plugins to add this css automatically, or some browsers might even keep those features in, but still, there will be users that don't know this, I think, resulting in a bad experience.
- sjwright 9y ago
 Presumably new web browsers will only drop support for styling these elements in standards compliance mode?
- reificator 9y ago
 I may not have expressed myself clearly, but I understood what OP was saying. Never overnight and post, kids. I was thinking about something like Stylish or the user stylesheet I've been hearing about in Firefox (for their UI IIRC, but still). Inject some global css on older/missing doctypes, and it's probably less than 200 total declarations to handle every older tag. I'd imagine to be the hardest and/or longest, followed by <blink> and <marquee>. Would be a small extension. My other point I think I expressed clearly enough, that the loss of presentational markup is not a loss of content in most cases. If the title is in Times New Roman instead of Arial, most of the time it'll just look worse. Unless the content is meta, the presentation is to make things more pleasant to read.
 - unicornporn 9y ago
 Not sure I'm getting you… An extension to view old pages? This is the worst idea I've heard in a long time. The web is awesome partly because it's backwards compatible.
 - 9y ago
tomc1985 9y ago
There are a ton of uses for old-style , , etc tags. CSS is both more verbose and more abstract. When I do not care about the "reusability" of a given code fragment, give me presentational markup tags all day long
chrismorgan 9y ago
The tag is still necessary because of HTML for emails and Microsoft’s disappointing decision back in 2007 to regress Outlook to using the MSO renderer/editor, which is worse than IE 5.0.
sureaboutthis 9y ago
<blink> has never been in any HTML specification since time began.
- reificator 9y ago
 And yet it can be supported just fine.
 - sureaboutthis 9y ago
 To nit-pick, no. You can emulate it, not support it, cause it doesn't exist anymore.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

I unapologetically still use the font tag, because most of the time I have no desire to bother with CSS.

taco_emoji 9y ago
Even inline? Blah vs. Blah
- bzbarsky 9y ago
 Just as a nit, "font-size:10pt" is a lot worse than from an accessibility perspective. is "one notch below the user's default size". If the user sets a 20pt font, it's going to be larger than 10pt. You could use "font-size: small" to get the size="2" behavior. (Also, "font-family: Whatever", not "font-face: Whatever".)
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
 Note that your CSS example is longer and requires combining two different syntaxes. And for one change, the difference in length and complexity is much more apparent. > Blah vs. > Blah Which is easier to remember? Which is more obvious at a glance?
 - maemilius 9y ago
 The former. The problem is just that you've learned what the latter means better than the former. I'm the opposite. Plus, the former is an absolute value where the latter is not, as far as I've been able to tell. I know that first span will always be 10pt font. I have no idea what "2" even means in this context.
 - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
 Another commenter did you a favor and explained why using 10pt is worse than using 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927837
 - reificator 9y ago
 That may be true, but regardless of whether pt is a best practice, the point remains that it is still a unit. IMO that puts it ahead of the alternative example.
- sureaboutthis 9y ago
 pt is for print and does not translate to the web. There are articles about this, specifically from the W3C https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html

orph4nus 9y ago

I think you're missing the OP's point though. It's true that you can just use some CSS to make up for the lost HTML feature, but than again you could also rewrite the HTML part. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure that what the OP is trying to say, is that there are plenty of great websites out there, which were developed a long time ago, and for which there is no maintainer to do any work on it. Thus having HTML elements like this dropped, would make the content in a way lost. Thinking about it some more, users can probably add plugins to add this css automatically, or some browsers might even keep those features in, but still, there will be users that don't know this, I think, resulting in a bad experience.

sjwright 9y ago
Presumably new web browsers will only drop support for styling these elements in standards compliance mode?
reificator 9y ago
I may not have expressed myself clearly, but I understood what OP was saying. Never overnight and post, kids. I was thinking about something like Stylish or the user stylesheet I've been hearing about in Firefox (for their UI IIRC, but still). Inject some global css on older/missing doctypes, and it's probably less than 200 total declarations to handle every older tag. I'd imagine to be the hardest and/or longest, followed by <blink> and <marquee>. Would be a small extension. My other point I think I expressed clearly enough, that the loss of presentational markup is not a loss of content in most cases. If the title is in Times New Roman instead of Arial, most of the time it'll just look worse. Unless the content is meta, the presentation is to make things more pleasant to read.
- unicornporn 9y ago
 Not sure I'm getting you… An extension to view old pages? This is the worst idea I've heard in a long time. The web is awesome partly because it's backwards compatible.
 - 9y ago

tomc1985 9y ago

There are a ton of uses for old-style , , etc tags. CSS is both more verbose and more abstract. When I do not care about the "reusability" of a given code fragment, give me presentational markup tags all day long

chrismorgan 9y ago

The tag is still necessary because of HTML for emails and Microsoft’s disappointing decision back in 2007 to regress Outlook to using the MSO renderer/editor, which is worse than IE 5.0.

sureaboutthis 9y ago

<blink> has never been in any HTML specification since time began.

reificator 9y ago
And yet it can be supported just fine.
- sureaboutthis 9y ago
  To nit-pick, no. You can emulate it, not support it, cause it doesn't exist anymore.