tzikeh

I'm certain that this happens to absolutely everyone--sometimes, someone will say "I had no idea!" about something regarding computers, or the Internet, that I had assumed was common knowledge. When that happens, I often think, "Gosh, I bet lots of people don't know this, and I could post about it!" And then I don't. But because so much of my community writes stories, and then posts them on the Internet, I thought I should bring this particiular info to folks' attention.

The and tags are deprecated, and have been since December, 2007. The standard HTML tag for italics is (emphasis). The standard HTML tag for bold is .

 and have been deprecated since the implementation of HTML4. Deprecated, in this instance, means that browsers will *most likely* support them, for backwards compatibility, but there is no guarantee as to how long that will hold true. At any point in the future, an updated version of a browser (or a new browser yet to be developed) may not support these tags, at which point the W3C will demote them from "deprecated" to "obsolete."

There are a bunch of other deprecated tags from HTML4, but these are the most prevalent in fanfiction, so I figured that highlighting these two, rather than posting a relatively comprehensive list, was a smart way to go.

I'm not saying fanfiction authors should rush out and search-and-replace all of these tags in all of their stories, but it's definitely something to consider. The and tags are a part of HTML5 (which has been under development since the day HTML4 was finalized), and the Last Call document for HTML5 is expected to be issued in May.

If you want to know more, you can visit HTML Goodies (a terrific resource for any HTML coding), or browse the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) site (extensive, with more news about HTML standards than you could ever hope to remember).