Why are the <center> tag depricated

I was making some html, and found out that center is depricated, that sounds
odd to me, cause that was a good and useful tag, can anyone tell me if there
has come anything better than it, or why else it has become depricated?

Richard

Richard wrote:

I was making some html, and found out that center is depricated, that sounds
odd to me, cause that was a good and useful tag, can anyone tell me if there
has come anything better than it, or why else it has become depricated?

Since HTML 4.0, *all* presentational elements (except <b> and <i>) have
been deprecated.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me - http://www.goddamn.co.uk/tobyink/?page=132

Toby A Inkster <tobyink (AT) goddamn (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

Since HTML 4.0, *all* presentational elements (except <b> and <i>) have
been deprecated.

I think most people would say that the non-deprecated elements <big> and
<small> are presentational, too, though this is somewhat arguable
(especially for <small>). And, arguably, <dl> with its subelements <dt>
and <dd> is presentational, since it lacks well-defined semantics and is
mostly used to get a particular visual appearance with no regard to
meaning. Moreover, <sub> and <sup> are problematic in a classification;
M^lle or 1^st is purely presentational, I would say.
And then there's <tfoot>. And in _attributes_ there are illogical
decisions too - e.g., the width attribute has been deprecated in some
elements but not in others.

On the other hand,
... the vectors <b>x</b> and <b>y</b> ...
and
... the species <i>Homo sapiens</i> ...
are examples of "semi-presentational" use of <b> and <i>. There's a
meaning one tries to convey, but in lack of adequate markup, one uses
elements that in principle mean nothing but bolding or italics.
Compare this with a hypothetical situation where HTML lacked
<strong> and <em> and you would want to emphasize some words in a text.

My point is that deprecation isn't quite as logical as one might think.
It's futile to try and find more logic than there is.

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

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Toby A Inkster <tobyink (AT) goddamn (DOT) co.uk> wrote:


Since HTML 4.0, *all* presentational elements (except <b> and <i>) have
been deprecated.


I think most people would say that the non-deprecated elements <big> and
small> are presentational, too, though this is somewhat arguable
(especially for <small>). And, arguably, <dl> with its subelements <dt
and <dd> is presentational, since it lacks well-defined semantics and is
mostly used to get a particular visual appearance with no regard to
meaning. Moreover, <sub> and <sup> are problematic in a classification;
M^lle or 1^st is purely presentational, I would say.
And then there's <tfoot>. And in _attributes_ there are illogical
decisions too - e.g., the width attribute has been deprecated in some
elements but not in others.

On the other hand,
... the vectors <b>x</b> and <b>y</b> ...
and
... the species <i>Homo sapiens</i> ...
are examples of "semi-presentational" use of <b> and <i>. There's a
meaning one tries to convey, but in lack of adequate markup, one uses
elements that in principle mean nothing but bolding or italics.
Compare this with a hypothetical situation where HTML lacked
strong> and <em> and you would want to emphasize some words in a text.

My point is that deprecation isn't quite as logical as one might think.
It's futile to try and find more logic than there is.

Is it correct/allowed to be able to define a style for <b> and <i> elements?

i.e.
b {font-weight:normal ; font-style:italic}

If this is so, then surely there is no need to depricate these tags,
because their influence can still be changed.

Of course, I could be spouting non-sense...

Will Gittoes <AskMeForIt (AT) NoSpam (DOT) org> wrote:

Is it correct/allowed to be able to define a style for <b> and <i
elements?

It depends. There is no prohibition against that in any specification,
and generally no reason why you shouldn't do so. But...

i.e.
b {font-weight:normal ; font-style:italic}

This is grossly illogical, since <b> markup _means_ 'bold face'. It's as
illogical as it would be to say
<font face="Arial" style="font-family:Courier New">
But not formally invalid, or otherwise forbidden. Imaginative people
might even find sensible uses for such illogical moves - e.g., when
viewing a page that illogically uses <b> just to emphasize some words a
little.

If this is so, then surely there is no need to depricate these tags,
because their influence can still be changed.

Of course, I could be spouting non-sense...

Well, to be honest, in part you are. Deprecation has nothing to do with
the changeability of influence. The reason for deprecating <center> is
that you can and should achieve the presentational effect using CSS
instead, thereby keeping structure and semantics as separate from
presentations, which may vary. The "can" part of this is still somewhat
questionable, since you need a few tricks to replace <center>
effectively, see "Centering blocks with CSS",
http://theodorakis.net/blockcenter.html

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