[whatwg] <font>

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 12:47 -0500 UTC, on 2007-05-01, Jon Barnett wrote:

[...]

> the only attribute specifically allowed on <font> is the "style" attribute.

Whoops. Somehow I overlooked that. My bad. But given that, I *really* don't
see the point of <font> anymore.

I've searched the archive at
<http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/> but can't find any
discussion leading to
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-presentational.html#style0>.

Maybe Ian can explain where this entry in the spec comes from; what the
rationale behind it is?

[...]

>Hopefully before editors start putting an HTML5
>DOCTYPE on HTML files, they'll stop using <font> in favor of something else.
>Until then, they can happily put HTML 4.01 Transition (not even Strict!) on
>their documents that include <font>

>From what I've seen typically these editors are used to edit fragments only.
They don't generate doctype declarations or any part of the head. They are
only used for (parts of) the body.

Btw, that seems to show another aspect of the problem with rather undefined
"WYSIWYG editors" I mentioned earlier: I don't believe it is common that an
inline/embedded/whatever editor is in the position to generate a "WYSIWYG
signature" through a meta element in the head. Typically that area of the
document is controllled by the host application itself, not by the editor
embedded in it. So for authoring tools to meet this requirement, both the
host environments (CMSs and such) and the editors embedded in them would need
to implement a common communication method. (Which would be very useful, for
example to make it easier to embed conformance checkers. But that's another
story.)


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>