Section 10.1. Choosing Text Elements

10.1. Choosing Text Elements

This chapter, jam-packed as it is with text elements, is a good opportunity for a reminder about the importance of well-structured and meaningful (semantic ) markup.

In the early years of web design, it was common to choose elements based on their default formatting in the browser. Don't like the size of the h1? Hey, use an h4 instead. Don't like bullets on your list? Make something list-like using br elements. Need indents? Blockquote it! Those days are over and gone.

Now we have Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to visually format any element any way we like, at last liberating us from the browsers' default rendering styles. That means you must choose elements that accurately describe your content. If you don't like how it looks, change it with a style sheet. If you don't see an HTML element that fits, use a generic div or span element to add appropriate structure and meaning.

Additional tips on good markup are listed in Chapter 8.

A Word on Deprecated Elements

Many elements and attributes in this book are marked as "deprecated," which means they are being phased out of HTML and are discouraged from use. Most of the deprecated elements and attributes are presentational and have analogous style sheet properties that should be used instead. Others are simply obsolete or poorly supported.

The W3C needed a way to get the HTML specification back on track while acknowledging legacy browser capabilities and the authoring methods that catered to them. Rather than yanking them all at once, causing virtually every site in the world to be invalid, they put the deprecated elements and attributes in a "transitional" DTD that is available while browsers get up to speed with standards and web authors (and authoring tools) change their markup practices.

Now that style sheet alternatives to presentational HTML are widely supported, it is time to start phasing deprecated elements out of your documents as well.