CSS or Deprecated Tags? Survey of Best Practice

[tmillerofkaplan]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to convince the Introduction to Web Design course developer at the online school where I teach that it is better to teach beginning students CSS from the beginning of the course instead of teaching deprecated font/face, font/size, etc tags.

In the example code we provide, I want to include an internal stylesheet and specify the style for the body tag with a very simple and clean font-family selector/declaration with three fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, and Comic Sans)...then briefly explain how this style affects all of the fonts in the simple body (which includes h1 and p tags).

What I'm asking you to do, is to email me at tmiller@kaplan.edu and state which method you recommend using for beginning students....teaching deprecated tags then switching to CSS later OR teaching CSS start from the beginning.

I've experimented with it and found the transition from deprecated to CSS was more difficult to achieve in the 10 week course than just starting out with CSS from the get-go.

However, I would appreciate you opinion.

In your email to me please include the following:

Your name
How many years Web experience
Your selection of teaching deprecated tags first or CSS from the start.

Thanks for you help.

Kind regards,
Terry Miller, Web Faculty
Kaplan University
www.kaplan.edu

[Fang]

First teach your students valid accessible html
Next, valid external css for conforming browsers, followed by css fixes for IE in conditional comments.
If you can get all that done in 10 weeks you will be doing well!

[Charles]

I've found that people are really resistive to changing the way they think about something. It's easier to start with a blank slate. That older type of HTML, the one that was found to be a big mistake, is all about thinking about the page visually. To do HTML right you have to think about it semantically. Once they start going down that wrong path it seems to require physical pain to switch back to the proper one.

[felgall]

Instead of calling them "deprecated" (which a lot of people don't undeerstand) they perhaps should instead have called them "obsolete" or "dead".

There is no excuse at all for ever using such tags in a new web page and those teaching dead tags need to themselves take an HTML class to learn what HTML is.