FONT used as SPAN

[Tim Lister]

I'm used to seeing crappy pages with FONT tags littered everywhere,
even for some bizarre reason when CSS is in use also, so i was less
than ecstatic when i saw it happening in yet another page.

however, on closer examination i saw the construct:

<font class="some_damn_thing"> ... </font>

and THIS was what was stuck in all over the place.

it seems valid, but why not use span? the page also had style tags,
for CSS, but no div tags, and used tables for formatting.

this is too weird to be criticised, the authors must have gone out of
their way to create this structure, when div and span would have done
it more easily, more correctly, and more extensibly.

since then, i've seen this trend popping up all over the place, and i
am somewhat bemused by it.

my query is: WHY?

[Jukka K. Korpela]

ta*@pacific.com.au (Tim Lister) wrote:

I'm used to seeing crappy pages with FONT tags littered everywhere,
even for some bizarre reason when CSS is in use also, so i was less
than ecstatic when i saw it happening in yet another page. - - it seems valid, but why not use span?

It's valid of course, under HTML 4.01 Transitional. But validity is,
contrary to popular and partly W3C-endorsed superstition, per se a
merely formal thing.

People probably use FONT tags mostly due to ignorance. But a case
could be made in favor of the idea that if you are really using some
inline markup _only_ to attach some font-related CSS properties to
it, FONT is more logical and more descriptive than SPAN. However, the
situations where this makes sense are rare. (I'm thinking about a
page that discusses fonts and therefore uses CSS in order to [try to]
render sample texts in the fonts discussed.)

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Tina Holmboe]

"Andrew Fedoniouk" <an****@terra-informatica.org> exclaimed in <AY***********************@news2.calgary.shaw.ca >:

You know what merely any element can be transformed to each other using CSS?
e.g. <span> to <div>, <font> to <li> and vice versa. Sic!
I'll disagree. A <font> cannot be transformed to <li> by CSS. The appearance
of text inside the font tag can be made to LOOK like it was inside a li tag,
but that does not change the meaning of the FONT (nothing) to that of the LI
(a list item).
I believe that concept of CSS is just wrong. It shouldn't allow to change
such basic behavioral attributes.

<font style="float: right; vertical-align: middle; width: 136px; height:
71px: border:...">Could you believe? I am the font!</font>

It doesn't change behaviour, only appearance. There is a huge difference,
and we all need to get away from the "apperance decides" way of thinking.

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
ti**@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

[Nick Kew]

In article <3f*************@news.pacific.net.au>, one of infinite monkeys
at the keyboard of ta*@pacific.com.au (Tim Lister) wrote:

<font class="some_damn_thing"> ... </font>

Guesses in the dark ...

A page littered with <font> crap. Someone made an attempt to tidy it
up without understanding what was going on. The actual editing might
have been automated.

BTW, I think you may have meant EM rather than SPAN in your subject line.
Applying a class locally to text is usually a way to emphasize a passage.

--
Nick Kew

In urgent need of paying work - see http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html

[François de Dardel]

brucie wrote:

In post <1f****************@alt-html.org>
brucie said...

<font face="arial">blah</font>

is bad because its html and the old way

<font style="font-family:arial;">blah</font>

is good because its CSS and the new way

Are you serious, Brucie, or is that irony?
For us not native English-speakers, the boundaries of nuance are
sometimes quite cloudy...

--
François de Dardel
--
http://mapage.noos.fr/dardelf/
Utilisez mon adresse sur noos seulement
Use only my noos e-mail

[Jim Dabell]

[Please don't post upside down.]
Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
[snip]

To follow you someone will ask why we are using this <span>s ?
Why just don't use <div style="display: inline">
Because the letters are not large divisions of the document, but small
pieces of text.

I believe that concept of CSS is just wrong. It shouldn't allow to change
such basic behavioral attributes.
CSS has very little to say about behaviour. It sounds to me like you are
assuming that particular element types should be presented in a certain
way, and anything else is wrong.

<font style="float: right; vertical-align: middle; width: 136px; height:
71px: border:...">Could you believe? I am the font!</font>

.... They say it is separation of presentation from content.
I would say ... totally... up to destruction of both.

Can you give me an example of somebody who advocates using this kind of
code? Last time I checked, <font> was deprecated and the style attribute
was on shaky ground.

Remember, just because CSS allows you to do stupid things, it doesn't mean
that you have to do them. For example:

* { display: none !important; }

Now each individual part of that is useful, but the application is stupid.
Should CSS contain complex rules to try and rule out stupid behaviour? I
guarantee you people would find loopholes, and use them. Far better to
simply assume authors have little bit of common sense.

--
Jim Dabell

[brucie]

In post <3f***********************@nan-newsreader-03.noos.net>
François de Dardel said...

<font face="arial">blah</font>

is bad because its html and the old way

<font style="font-family:arial;">blah</font>

is good because its CSS and the new way

Are you serious, Brucie, or is that irony?
it does look bad when you take it out of context with the paragraph
that was above it.
For us not native English-speakers, the boundaries of nuance are
sometimes quite cloudy...

i was demonstrating the possible thought process of a html/css newbie

--
brucie a. blackford. 03/August/2003 07:18:36 am kilo.
http://loser.brucies.com/

[Andrew Fedoniouk]

> I'll disagree. A <font> cannot be transformed to <li> by CSS. The
appearance

of text inside the font tag can be made to LOOK like it was inside a li tag, but that does not change the meaning of the FONT (nothing) to that of the LI (a list item).
It doesn't change behaviour, only appearance. There is a huge difference, and we all need to get away from the "apperance decides" way of

thinking.

Hi Tina, take a look here:

http://www.blocknote.net/tests/28.htm

As far as I understand an idea: any arbitrary named tag can be transformed
to anything.
Therefore you may forget about HTML tags. Just select any name for your
"personal" tag and apply various styles to it.

Content and presentation for human are tied together.
You cannot separate them completely. This separation is just an abstract
idea.
For example: visual order of elements is also part of the content. If you
will change order you will destroy content.

By just applying different CSS anyone can totally destroy(to make it
unreadable) content of any document.
Or worse: to misinterpret content.
You think that this is not a destruction?

I believe that we will end up (if not already) with pure XML + CSS.
The question is what for these HTML 4, 4.01, XHTML, etc?

Andrew.
http://blocknote.net
http://terra-informatica.org

[Stephen Poley]

On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 15:01:29 GMT, "Andrew Fedoniouk"
<an****@terra-informatica.org> wrote:

Content and presentation for human are tied together.
You cannot separate them completely. This separation is just an abstract
idea.
Are you claiming that the statement "The summer of 1947 was hot", as
read out by a narrator in a television documentary, means something
different from the statement "The summer of 1947 was hot" on an Web
page, and the statement "The summer of 1947 was hot" in a Usenet posting
means something different again? Does the meaning change if it is in
green text instead of black? Or if the letter size is 12 point instead
of 10 point?
For example: visual order of elements is also part of the content. If you
will change order you will destroy content.

By just applying different CSS anyone can totally destroy(to make it
unreadable) content of any document.

Of course. For example: * { color: black; background-color: black; }
So what? Since when has the possibility of doing something in a silly
fashion been an argument against doing it in a sensible fashion?

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

[Andrew Fedoniouk]

Hi Stephen.

Are you claiming that the statement "The summer of 1947 was hot", as
read out by a narrator in a television documentary, means something
different from the statement "The summer of 1947 was hot" on an Web
page, and the statement "The summer of 1947 was hot" in a Usenet posting
means something different again? Does the meaning change if it is in
green text instead of black? Or if the letter size is 12 point instead
of 10 point?

Sounds like citation from HTML standard :)

Remeber, initial question was "Why FONT not SPAN".

Here is a fragment of "Chris Morris" <c.********@durham.ac.uk> message

"HTML is a language for describing the structure of the document - so
if there's an element that exists that has the desired meaning, it
should be used in preference to a generic element such as <div> or
<span>.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/ITS/WWW/accessi...2/structural.p
hp"

And this is it.

For example: visual order of elements is also part of the content. If you
will change order you will destroy content.

By just applying different CSS anyone can totally destroy(to make it
unreadable) content of any document.

Of course. For example: * { color: black; background-color: black; }
So what? Since when has the possibility of doing something in a silly
fashion been an argument against doing it in a sensible fashion?

You didn't get my point (propably of my English, beg my pardon again):
In short:
E.g. <EM>...<SPAN> must always stay as inline tags. No any presentation
layers (e.g. CSS) must be allowed to change its inline text nature.
ONLY this way we can preserve inital idea of HTML: "HTML documents are SGML
documents with generic semantics that are appropriate for representing
information from a wide range of applications."

Otherwise we will end up with WYSIWYG HTML generators (here goes
self-criticism) which will generate perfect sequence of CSS statements
slightly mixed by <DIV>s and <SPAN>s only.

My second point: HTML is hyperTEXTmarkuplanguage (information) not an
USERINTERFACEmarkuplanguage (presentation).
These two are completely different entities. Yes they do overlap somehow but
attempt to interbreed them in one entity will follow us to one fuzzy
something which is not strong/strict enough for defining presentation and is
just more and more bad for information presentation. And I am yet silent
about complexity of implementation of such hybrid. Non-robustness of current
implementations of HTML clients is a direct consequence.

I thought that idea of XUL with HTML islands will be popular. But...

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terra-informatica.org
http://blocknote.net