Best PracticesMigrating Sites and Pages Away from the FONT Tag

Best PracticesMigrating Sites and Pages Away from the <FONT> Tag

On a continuing basis, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) reviews the standards that are in practice regarding the technical standards used to develop web pages. During these reviews, they work to identify elements that are no longer effective and deprecate them. A good example of a deprecated element is the <font> tag. In the past, applying styles to text required that a <font> tag be applied everywhere in the text that the font changed beyond the default settings. This meant that whenever you changed font face, a <font> tag was applied. When you changed font size, a <font> tag was applied. The end result was <font> tags being heavily used in pages, causing bloated code and slower download times. Luckily, CSS provides a much better method of adding style to text.

If, however, you built sites in the past that relied on the <font> tag rather than style sheets, it might be a good idea to schedule a code review and work toward migrating them to styles instead. Does this mean that your website will not continue to work or that the font styles will suddenly stop working? No. But it does mean that as newer versions of browsers are released, the support for the <font> tag will be removed and your pages might not render predictably.

Note

For more details on working with text in Dreamweaver, take a look at Chapter 22, "Introducing Dreamweaver 8."