Posted by Richard at October 5th, 2007

Flock and I may have hit the first bump in our otherwise all-honeymoon of a relationship. (You’ll notice there’s no “blogged with Flock” below.)

Okay, I admit it: I’m a convert to the notion of structural markup, and that means I’m probably more fanatical than other, saner people who have real things to worry about. But let’s reality check this a bit:

  • In 1999, the W3C deprecated the font tag, along with other presentational tags, removing them from the HTML specification. No subsequent version of the HTML spec has included the font tag.
  • Microsoft Word, as painfully bad as its HTML export feature is, has not used the font tag in its export since 2000.
  • The biggest player in the Web design software world, Dreamweaver, removed the deprecated tags from their software to bring them into conformity with W3C standards. If you see a font tag in a Dreamweaver site, someone hand-coded it.
  • The big-name freebie HTML editor Mozilla Composer (and it’s successors Seamonkey Composer, Nvu, and Kompozer) haven’t used a font tag since sometime in 2003 (if not earlier).
  • I started using the Blogger WYSIWYG editor way back in the distant past (whenever the hell they finally got around to releasing it). It’s never inserted a font tag into my posts. Neither has the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress (or any other major blogging service).
  • I was cracking the knuckles of my own employees and freelancers back in 2005 on the use of the font tag.

Really, there’s no excuse for a product, especially a product that is supposedly hip to the whole 2.0 thing, using deprecated, non-standard, presentational HTML. But when I was constructing my (absolutely brilliant) post on Buzzword just moments ago, I flipped over to code view and instead of giving me headings, Flock had used the font tag to resize my text. I did a doubletake. My sweety had betrayed me. It’s like dating someone for a year and finding out they voted for George W. Bush in 2004.

Of course, Flock isn’t the only offender. Check out this code snip from hip 2.0 darling Texty:

<font face="arial black,avant garde" size="4">This is a test of the Texty <strong>WYSIWYG</strong> editor. </font>

I mean, they did replace the awful, bad, nasty, and presentational markup tag <b> with the correct, good, and lovely structural markup tag <strong>. But then they reverted to using the font tag.

In the era of Ajax and RSS and A List Apart, don’t these kids know better?

Yes, I need a life. I’ll return to blogging after my ensuing weekend visits to Mark, the only bartender in Baltimore who understands me. (No really - the others thought Jack Daniels was a bourbon - idgits.)