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Depreciated HTML / XHTML tags and attributes, what you should avoid and how can replace them.

Hello again,

Todays little foray into verbosity, is a summary of all the tags and attributes I can think of, or find online that are considered "depricated" in modern HTML and XHTML.
When I say depricated, what I mean is that they are not supported in the current "real" strict HTML/XHTML standards.
That doesn't mean you can't use them however, it simply means you can't use a "strict" doc type and still expect your page to validate if you do use them.
You can however, use most of these if you use the "transitional" HTML or XHTML doc type.
That doesn't mean you should though, the transitional doc type is just what it sounds like, it should be used in the transition to strict HTML or XHTML compliance. In other words, that means that if your site already uses these tags, you should use a transitional doc type while you slowly remove the depricated tags.

The modern equivalent of the majority of these tags and attributes is CSS, CSS is immensely powerful in the right hands and can provide the vast majority of formatting that we used to have specific tags for.

As the web moves closer and closer to XML, and the number of non PC devices that access it increases, CSS and XHTML will become more and more important for you to reach "all" of your intended audience.

Anyway, enough blathering, there are the lists of depricated tags and attributes for your perusal.

Note: when Franki first did this tutorial he mistakenly used the word depreciated (and one could argue the meaning is similiar). I suspect some may make a similiar mistake, so I dropped this note in to maintain the keyword search for that word as well.

Depreciation Tags (alphabetically listed.)

<applet> Use the <object> tag instead, see here for more information.
<basefont> Use CSS instead.
<blockquote> Define a CSS style to achieve the same effect.
<center> Use CSS instead.
<dir> use an unordered list <ul> instead.
<em> Use CSS instead.
<font> Use CSS instead.
<isindex>  
<listing> use <pre> and or CSS instead.
<menu> Replace with the <ul> tag and/or CSS instead.
<nextid>  
<plaintext> use <pre> or
<a href='view-source:http://somesite.com'>Source code</a> instead.
<s> Use <del> and or <ins> instead.
<strike> Use <del> and or <ins> instead.
<u> Use CSS instead.
<xmp> Use <pre> and a CSS style instead.

Depreciated HTML / XHTML tag Attributes (alphabetically listed.)

All of these can be replaced with CSS styles.
align
alink
background
bgcolor
color
hspace
link
size
text
type
vlink
vspace


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