Good Bye, <FONT FACE>s

Somebody recently pointed out to me -- correctly, to my chagrin -- that structurally, it is just plain wrong to use a <font> tag outside a <p>. Of course, this could be helped by using <br> instead, but that would be cheating.

Hell On Earth is gradually mutating into a HTML-4.0 zone, with FONT FACE definitions giving way to Style Sheets. Kicking and screaming, this site is being dragged towards the new standards.

HTML 4.0 Transitional means, however, that the site will not be full of layer definitions or flaky JavaScript which will crash Netscape when Netscape feels like it. Just Cascading Style Sheets, which are currently supported by the following browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 and above
• Netscape Navigator and Communicator 4.0 and above
• Opera 3.21 and above

There are a few Bad Things about CSS, however.

The Truth About CSS

The Style Sheet Implementations of Communicator and Internet Explorer differ drastically, to the point of being downright infuriating.

At this point, it is much easier to fake a nice layout with physical tags (FONT FACE etc.) than to do it in CSS, because Netscape and Microsoft choose to interpret the W3C standard in different ways.

For instance, Netscape doesn't give a rat's ass about a margin-bottom : 0.1em definition when applied to a heading -- or any other margin tag. It will, however, roughly give you what you want if you define a float : left parameter, which Internet Explorer will, in turn, ignore.

More details about these problems are available at the WebStandards Project home page, among others.