#why are names bolded and titles italicized? to make long text easier to read.

[humunanunga]

I did something completely unnecessary and looked up ages and timelines for dreamland/isekai protagonists and liminal spaces. What you do with the following information will be for you to deal with now. (Because I feverishly looked all of this up between the span of last night and this morning, despite math not being my strong suit, there is a chance I took a few wrong notes here and there. If you catch any I missed, I’ll edit the op.)

In late 2020, presumably mid-December after everyone’s birthdays passed, Eustace and Jill (the Final Battle) would be 87, Fran Bow would be 76, Milo (the Phantom Tollbooth) would be 69-72, Jesse Aarons (the Bridge to Terabithia) would be 52-60, Sarah Willians would be 50-55 (depending on when between 1980 and 1986 The Labyrinth is set in), cinema Bastian B. Bux would be 52 (book Bastian would be 46), the surviving Stranger Things cast would all be 37 years older, Sunny (OMORI) would be 40-44, Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes) would be 41, Helena Campbell (Mirrormask) would be 30-34, Misfortune R.H. would’ve been 27, Coraline would be 22-30, Madotsuki could’ve been anywhere between 26 and 45 if she survived, assuming this was set in the year of the release date, Max (the Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl) would be 25, and if the same assumption as for Yume Nikki applies, Ib would be 17 (quoting exact years in an abstract alternate dimension is not exactly reliable), making Garry presumably between 26 and 37.

Clara Silberhaus (the Nutcracker) was a senior by the time Alice fell into Wonderland.

Dorothy Gale was the same age as Digory and Polly (the Magician’s Nephew). They would have been in their twenties when Peter Pan and his shadow met Wendy, who would be in her mid-to-late twenties when Christopher Robin played in the Hundred-Acre Wood. Christopher would have been 24 when Fran Bow was taken to Ithersta. (And while it could be written off as an easter egg, a younger alternate Fran was friends with an alternate Alice. Being a younger alternate, they could have both been born later than in the timeline of the player’s Fran.)

Christopher Robin was 29 when Narnia was rebuilt from scratch, Wendy was in her mid-to-late 30′s, and Dorothy, Digory and Polly were ~69 (nice).

Milo (the Phantom Tollbooth) and Jesse Aarons are 9-20 years apart depending on when in the 70′s Jess and Leslie’s stories are supposed to take place.

The main events of Stranger Things mainly take place in Hawkins, Indiana, starting in 1983-- or 1979 if you count the first time a gate was opened even temporarily. Project Async’s known operations ran between the late 1980′s and late 1990′s, and is implicated by association with the Loma Prieta earthquake to be based in California. Their first prototype was run in May 1982, a year before the first sustained opening into the Upside-Down. The events of EverymanHYBRID concluded in 2010.

The City of Light and Land of Shadows, the Hundred-Acre Wood, the Lands Beyond, Neverland, Wonderland and the Looking Glass, the beldam (in the book wherein Coraline did not take place in Oregon) and much of Narnia’s invitations all made contact with our world (or at least one variation thereof) through England, especially London. Whether pagan practice was all that stood between Brits and an outbreak of dimensional rifts before the christianization of Europe remains unknown. If all these events happened in the same universe, well, maybe that just happened to be the arrival point of that escape route The Web was working on. I, of course, am entertained by the idea of Jon the Archivist becoming Jon the Hunger in this absolute crossover singularity I’ve just propositioned.

[cophoenixseo]

Local Business SEO Domination

Note: this is a lengthy article and assumes some knowledge of SEO concepts. If you need a primer on SEO, the post Search Engine Optimization Explained will be useful and should be read prior to diving into this post on local search engine optimization.

For small businesses to dominate the competition and win the search engine war, they must focus on optimizing key website ranking factors such as site structure, page content, links, keywords and meta tags. Ignore these things and you risk getting lost in cyberspace! For this reason, there is a big rush for many SMBs to acquire an expert SEO consultant.

A well-trained SEO expert will be able to identify the keywords that best describe the company and its products, then get them listed and ranked on the major search engines. When searching, people usually use keywords or phrases to find what they want. These keywords are important, especially for small businesses, to stay competitive.

In the coming years, small businesses will need to be even more aggressive to compete in their market as the consumer turns to the Internet for shopping and small business sourcing. Thus, setting aside budget for SEO should be a high priority. Small businesses do not have the same capitalization as their larger competitors, but if the techniques for implementing a well-planned local SEO campaign are adopted, success will be easier to achieve. Since the Internet presents a level playing field for both large and small companies the best solution for a local business to compete and win against their larger rival is to be visible on Google. Forbes wrote a great article on 7 reasons that small businesses should care about local SEO.

 SEO success starts with a focus on the major ranking factors

Statistical analysis of the top ranking factors used by search engines gives us a reasonable view into the top factors for ranking, and their weighting has remained relatively constant for years. Focus on these points, and spend your efforts building a better, attractive, more easily navigated, and more informative website. Remember, we are building websites for real people, not the Google bot.

Let’s start with the all important 40/40/20 ratio. Through statistical analysis of thousands of sites, search engine analysts have discovered that 40% of rankings are a result of on-page factors. Another 40% are a result of off-page factors including backlinks and intra-site links, and 20% are a result of the URL naming convention. Note that the exact percentages vary slightly between engines, but the general balance of factors remains consistent.

Following are three key factors for ranking. With discipline, focus, and patience if you work on these critical elements you will be nearly guaranteed to see your search engine results improve.

 The first ranking factor is called ‘on-page,’ where you must identify the optimum keywords to use and place them in the right location, with the proper density.

If you don’t know where to start with your keyword development, there is no better resource than Google and the Keyword Planner is an excellent tool to discover what people are searching for. You can access the Keyword Planner at https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

For example, a site owner that sells home decoration products might type in ‘home decor’, ‘wall decor’ or ‘interior design decorations’ and the tool will return all the permutations of those phrases that your customers may use to find your site.

Develop pages following the 40/40/20 formula for each of the terms you identify in the keyword planner, focusing on a few keywords or phrases per page. What are the right places and density to add keywords on a page? The best is in the title tag, the description tag, and the keywords tag. But, DO NOT STUFF them, be elegant and think about your reader.

Remember that we are building pages for humans, not computers (search engines). Which even if your page is not penalized by Google for keywords that appear too frequently, keyword stuffed content will not be as readable, or the message may be jumbled, which will not help with conversion. You may be tempted to think, “I’ll add my keyword in just one more place,” but using the keyword LESS may improve your rankings just the same. Put simply, don’t overuse keywords, and stick to regular sentence structures.

Read a blog post on the topic here http://seorankeragency.com/stop-spamming-add-value-engage-readers/

Let’s look at some of the latest data for the sweet spot for on-page ranking factors. It turns out that 10 to 20% keyword density for the tile and 10% density for the meta description is optimal. As for placement, adding the keyword at or toward the beginning of each field is preferred. As an example, if we want to use our keyword ‘home decor’, an optimal title tag could be ‘vintage home decor accessories’.

For the keyword list on each page, you can enter up to twenty words or phrases placing the highest value words at the beginning. Note that all words should appear in the body text of the page. Also, make sure the description field is well written and attention grabbing as it will be shown in some organic search result records. You want it to be customer friendly as well as easy for Google to understand.

The requirement for the quantity of body text needed to rank is contested among SEOs. Some feel the number of words on a page does not contribute significantly to ranking, while others declare any fewer than two or three thousand words is needed. But in general, everyone agrees that 1000 words should be a minimum target. Keep the keyword density around 2%, and if possible make sure keywords are spaced out in the article at the beginning, middle and end.

There are dozens, if not more, keyword density analyzers that you can use to measure this metric. My suggestion is to find one you like and ignore the rest. You’ll get conflicting reports from various sites which can be misleading and confusing, causing you to think that you must re-tweak other factors. But don’t fall into the trap. You’ll only spend hours optimizing for that tool, just to discover the next tool provides a different answer.

SEO dominance is not about getting one single ranking factor perfect, but rather balancing all the key factors so that Google sees your site as being of higher quality or informational value than your competitor. Remember, ranking is a competition, but where the competitors are not every website on the Internet, only those who also are competing for the same keywords. One tool to help with keyword analysis on your site is the Google Search Console.

Other notable on-page factors include image alt tags, H1-H6 tags, bold and italic text, and the number of outgoing (inter and intrasite) links.

Image alt tags matter as a condition for ranking which is why you want to get your keywords placed in these fields. But do not stuff them. Also, H1-H6 tags are excellent ways to call attention to what your page or article is about, make sure to utilize these valuable heading tags. Bold and italicized text though not as strong as ‘H tags’ may contribute to ranking. But again, use them naturally. You want your page to read normally and not be one sea of bolded black text.

On-page links are an important contributor to ranking, and some go so far as to say they are one of the single most important objectives. The idea for valuing external links as of critical importance is because they are a metric that is difficult to manipulate and therefore is the central method for a search engine to determine the popularity of a website.

Off page factors for ranking include links from within your site as well as ‘backlinks’ from external websites. Backlinks are required to rank well, and this is probably the most challenging aspect of search engine optimization.

PageRank, the algorithm developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (Google co-founder) counts hyperlinks as votes to determine the popularity (or ranking) of a site. Twenty years later, this algorithm is much more sophisticated, yet it still includes the notion of external links as being votes for ranking a websites popularity. For this reason, SEOs often talk about their “linking strategies” and some consider this to be their protected intellectual property not to be divulged except under threat of death. 

Search engines don’t know what your page looks like but your visitors do care, and the major search engines are now tracking how long a user stays on the page. The search engine is also recording whether the visitor return to the search results to find another page, which would suggest that your site did not provide the value they were seeking. For this reason, you should strive to make your site clean, useful and engaging, as this will benefit your rankings. To help analyze how your site compares, Google Analytics can be a useful tool to gather information on session time and dozens of other relevant data points. 

To win at SEO, you must be continuously acquiring backlinks, or your rankings will stagnate, or drop. But again, remember, we want everything we do to appear as natural as possible. Optimally, you’ll place a few links a day, with a steady increase in the total number.

Options for obtaining links:

1- Link exchange is where you request links from other sites that are topically relevant where you swap links to pass power between both websites.

2- Blog commenting is a good way to place links on high authority websites. The key is to keep your comment relevant to the blog post and don’t be too promotional. Make a value added statement with a link to a reinforcing blog post on your site. You’ll be surprised at the power that is passed from the referring site to yours with a simple blog post comment.

3- Directory placements are another way to get backlinks. Every area will have a local business directory, and every industry has websites dedicated to promoting members of the industry or ecosystem. In many cases, these sites are free to register with, and they can represent a powerful “push” to your site.

4- Press releases. The value of a press release has been diminished by the Internet, since PR is no longer an “event” but rather with every blog post, directory comment, social share, etc. PR is occurring. However, when you issue a press release via PRWeb or PR News Wire, it can get picked up by dozens or hundreds of websites who re-post your release, whereby giving you an instant boost.

5- Guest blogging can be an excellent way to improve your credibility as not only will the authority of your author name be improved, but the website will benefit too. High profile blogs are hungry for content and many welcome outside contributors. Business Insider is an excellent place to start, as is Inc. or Huffington Post.

6- Third party article distribution services such as quuu.co can be an excellent way to promote your blog posts and get links on hundreds of other websites.

7- Paid placement on high authority sites is another option that should not be overlooked. Konker.io is an excellent avenue for finding link hosting sellers.

Tips regarding article distribution. Articles should be of high quality, readable, and provide helpful information to prospective customers. Don’t start a link scheme that will give you 500 in a single day, then zero for the next month as this will do more harm than good.

Caveats about links. Links from within your site should be text links, with the keyword in the link. For example, a body lotions site could use the term ‘body lotions’ in all the links to their essential lotions page. Off-site links should use keywords in text links, but not always the same words. Mix it up, about 30% of your links should just include the web page address which will help your backlinks appear naturally created.

A final note on backlinks, all pages are not weighted equally. The older and more relevant the page or website, the more weight that link will garner. If your site is selling home decor products, links from an interior design website will be more beneficial than those from a health and wellness site. Make sure all referring domains that connect to your site are topically relevant.

Let’s discuss the other 20% of factors for ranking and that is URL naming convention. Web pages with the keywords in the domain or URL, be it the homepage or any other page on the site, will rank better. If you’re just starting a site, getting your primary keywords in the URL is useful. Though not a requirement for ranking, if possible, obtaining an exact match domain (EMD) can give you a quick start to a higher ranking for your biggest keyword. Here is where working with an expert internet optimization search marketing company can save you much time, energy and wasted resources.

Unfortunately, however, there are few niches left where the major keyword is not already registered. Getting a major keyword in the domain is nice, but you should know that it can cause issues with your on-page SEO since it will be easy to get overoptimized by using the keyword too frequently.

For this reason, some SEO experts suggest NOT using an EMD. The key to remember is that it appears more “natural” to Google if the file does not have only keywords in it, such as the title and meta tags. If you already have pages without keywords, you could create new ones and use a 301 redirect from the old pages to maintain any ranking status that the original pages had. Do a little research to get this right. Search engine ranking criteria change regularly, and some engines are quicker to appreciate your optimization efforts than others.

SEO Rule #1 – be patient. It can take months to see results of search engine optimization. Don’t think you made a mistake just because nothing happened the first time a spider visited your new page. Keep working on your accumulation of backlinks, and resist the temptation for a “quick fix” and you will be ranking in no time.

Website visitors are only one part of the equation.

A well-designed site, product mix, and pricing, with a clear call to action and value proposition, are all essential for business success. SEO and Internet marketing are critically important activities for all businesses, especially local, but SEO alone will not determine your success. The construction of your website is the skeletal structure that SEO must reside on, but without a strong skeleton, the lead engine of a website plus SEO will not be as powerful as we wish it to be.

Some local business owners of service companies don’t know how many leads their website is generating. Tragically, many business owners look at their website as an expense instead of a revenue source. A small business website is an asset, and a good website works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But one of the most challenging questions is where to start if your website isn’t working for you. Consider the following elements as important pieces of your Google domination strategy.

1. Traffic. How many ways are you driving traffic to your website? Are you relying on a single “killer” method? Traffic to a website is about balance and tracking. When you have a balance of sources, like PPC, SEO, and even print media you won’t get stuck relying on a single source. Track each source to minimize your costs and maximize your profits.

2. Conversion. What methods are you using to convert traffic to leads? Do you offer people an easy way to start a relationship with you? Do you offer multiple ways for people to contact you? In less than 10 seconds ask yourself is it easy for people to decide what action to take? To improve may mean a new landing page, or it may be that your messages are confusing and need to be simplified. Often, less is more. You don’t need to tell me everything about your company or product, just give me the one thing that will cause me to “want more.” Then make it easy to take action on wanting more. SEO will increase your traffic, but only you can convert it.

3. Follow-up. Not everyone will be ready to buy when they visit your website. For this reason, you should have a newsletter form where those who may not be willing to buy, but would appreciate receiving updates or relevant information, can do so. A converting small business website should include a mechanism for tracking who came to your site so you can stay in touch. Just be sure you aren’t spamming your visitors, add value, and they will respond, perhaps by calling you first before making a buying decision.

Improving your website is a process. There isn’t a silver bullet, but with proper planning and the help of a trained search engine optimization specialist and web developer, your website can become a powerful profit booster.

Watch this short video on the value of local SEO, and if you would like more information, just click the link to learn more about top rated search marketing firm SEO Ranker Agency. /* Toogle */ .icp_form-4-1 { /* Background Color */ background-color:#ecf0f1; /*background-color: #2980b9;*/ /*background-color:#e74c3c;*/ /*background-color:#f1c40f;*/ /*#2980b9,*/ /* Font Style */ font-family: 'Titillium Web', sans-serif, Arial; line-height: 1.5px !important; /*font-family: 'Maven Pro', sans-serif;*/ /*font-family: 'Roboto Condensed', sans-serif;*/ /*font-family:'Bitter', serif;*/ } .icp_form-4-1 img { max-width:100%; box-shadow:none; display: inline-block; } /* =================================================== */ /* Form 4 */ .icp_form-4-1 { /* Size and position */ width: 88%; margin: 0 auto 0px; padding: 4%; position: relative; /* Font styles */ /*color: #2c3e50;*/ vertical-align: top; text-align: center; font-family: 'Titillium Web', sans-serif, Arial !important; } .icp_form-4-1 .top4 { background: #2C3E50; 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[holytheoristtastemaker]

The internet has been around for a long while, and over time we’ve changed the way we think about web design. Many old techniques and ways of doing things have gotten phased out as newer and better alternatives have been created, and we say that they have been deprecated. Deprecated. It’s a word we use and see often. But have you stopped to think about what it means in practice? What are some examples of deprecated web elements, and why don’t we use them any more? What is deprecation? In everyday English, to “deprecate” something is to express disapproval of it. For example, you might be inclined to deprecate a news story you don’t like. When we’re speaking in a technical sense, however, deprecation is the discouragement of use for an old feature. Often, the old feature remains functional in the interests of backward compatibility (so legacy projects don’t break). In essence, this means that you can technically still do things the legacy way. It’ll probably still work, but maybe it’s better to use the new way.  Another common scenario is when technical elements get deprecated as a prelude to their future removal (which we sometimes call “sunsetting” a feature). This provides everybody time to transition from the old way of working to the new system before the transition happens. If you follow WordPress at all, they recently did this with their radically new Gutenberg editor. They shipped it, but kept an option available to revert to the “classic” editor so users could take time to transition. Someday, the “classic” editor will likely be removed, leaving Gutenberg as the only option for editing posts. In other words, WordPress is sunsetting the “classic” editor. That’s merely one example. We can also look at HTML features that were once essential staples but became deprecated at some point in time. Why do HTML elements get deprecated? Over the years, our way of thinking about HTML has evolved. Originally, it was an all-purpose markup language for displaying and styling content online. Over time, as external stylesheets became more of a thing, it began to make more sense to think about web development differently — as a separation of concerns where HTML defines the content of a page, and CSS handles the presentation of it. This separation of style and content brings numerous benefits: Avoiding duplication: Repeating code for every instance of red-colored text on a page is unwieldy and inefficient when you can have a single CSS class to handle all of it at once.  Ease of management: With all of the presentation controlled from a central stylesheet, you can make site-wide changes with little effort. Readability: When viewing a website’s source, it’s a lot easier to understand the code that has been neatly abstracted into separate files for content and style.  Caching: The vast majority of websites have consistent styling across all pages, so why make the browser download those style definitions again and again? Putting the presentation code in a dedicated stylesheet allows for caching and reuse to save bandwidth.  Developer specialization: Big website projects may have multiple designers and developers working on them, each with their individual areas of expertise. Allowing a CSS specialist to work on their part of the project in their own separate files can be a lot easier for everybody involved.  User options: Separating styling from content can allow the developer to easily offer display options to the end user (the increasingly popular ‘night mode’ is a good example of this) or different display modes for accessibility.  Responsiveness and device independence: separating the code for content and visual presentation makes it much easier to build websites that display in very different ways on different screen resolutions. However, in the early days of HTML there was a fair amount of markup designed to control the look of the page right alongside the content. You might see code like this:  Hello world! …all of which is now deprecated due to the aforementioned separation of concerns.  Which HTML elements are now deprecated? As of the release of HTML5, use of the following elements is discouraged: (use instead) (use ) (use CSS font properties, like font-size, font-family, etc.) (use CSS font-size) (use CSS text-align) (use ) (use CSS font properties) (use ) (not needed any more) (not needed any more) (not needed any more) (use text-decoration: line-through in CSS) (use text-decoration: line-through in CSS) (use ) There is also a long list of deprecated attributes, including many elements that continue to be otherwise valid (such as the align attribute used by many elements). The W3C has the full list of deprecated attributes. Why don’t we use table for layouts any more? Before CSS became widespread, it was common to see website layouts constructed with the element. While the element is not deprecated, using them for layout is strongly discouraged. In fact, pretty much all HTML table attributes that were used for layouts have been deprecated, such as cellpadding, bgcolor and width.  At one time, tables seemed to be a pretty good way to lay out a web page. We could make rows and columns any size we wanted, meaning we could put everything inside. Headers, navigation, footers… you name it! That would create a lot of website code that looked like this: Blah blah blah! There are numerous problems with this approach: Complicated layouts often end up with tables nested inside other tables, which creates a headache-inducing mess of code. Just look at the source of any email newsletter. Accessibility is problematic, as screen readers tend to get befuddled by the overuse of tables. Tables are slow to render, as the browser waits for the entire table to download before showing it on the screen. Responsible and mobile-friendly layouts are very difficult to create with a table-based layout. We still have not found a silver bullet for responsive tables (though many clever ideas exist). Continuing the theme of separating content and presentation, CSS is a much more efficient way to create the visual layout without cluttering the code of the main HTML document.  So, when should we use? Actual tabular data, of course! If you need to display a list of baseball scores, statistics or anything else in that vein, is your friend.  Why do we still use and tags? “Hang on just a moment,” you might say. “How come bold and italic HTML tags are still considered OK? Aren’t those forms of visual styling that ought to be handled with CSS?” It’s a good question, and one that seems difficult to answer when we consider that other tags like and are deprecated. What’s going on here? The short and simple answer is that and would probably have been deprecated if they weren’t so widespread and useful. CSS alternatives seem somewhat unwieldy by comparison: .emphasis { font-weight:bold } This is a bold word! This is a bold word! This is a bold word! The long answer is that these tags have now been assigned some semantic meaning, giving them value beyond pure visual presentation and allowing designers to use them to confer additional information about the text they contain. This is important because it helps screen readers and search crawlers better understand the purpose of the content wrapped in these tags. We might italicize a word for several reasons, like adding emphasis, invoking the title of a creative work, referring to a scientific name, and so on. How does a screen reader know whether to place spoken emphasis on the word or not? and have companions, including , and . Together, these tags make the meaning context of text clearer: is for drawing attention to text without giving it any additional importance. It’s used when we want to draw attention to something without changing the inflection of the text when it is read by a screen reader or without adding any additional weight or meaning to the content for search engines. is a lot like but signals the importance of something. It’s the same as changing the inflection of your voice when adding emphasis on a certain word. italicizes text without given it any additional meaning or emphasis. It’s perfect for writing out something that is normally italicized, like the scientific name of an animal. is like in that it italicizes text, but it provides adds additional emphasis (hence the tag name) without adding more importance in context. (‘I’m sure I didn’t forget to feed the cat’).  is what we use to refer to the title of a creative work, say a movie like The Silence of the Lambs. This way, text is styled but doesn’t affect the way the sentence would be read aloud.  In general, the rule is that and are to be used only as a last resort if you can’t find anything more appropriate for your needs. This semantic meaning allows and to continue to have a place in our modern array of HTML elements and survive the deprecation that has befallen other, similar style tags. On a related note, — the underline tag — was at one time deprecated, but has since been restored in HTML5 because it has some semantic uses (such as annotating spelling errors). There are many other HTML elements that might lend styling to content, but primarily serve to provide semantic meaning to content. Mandy Michael has an excellent write-up that covers those and how they can be used (and even combined!) to make the most semantic markup possible. Undead HTML attributes Some deprecated elements are still in widespread use around the web today. After all, they still work — they’re just discouraged. This is sometimes because word hasn’t gotten around that that thing you’ve been using for ages isn’t actually the way it’s done any more. Other times, it’s due to folks who don’t see a compelling reason to change from doing something that works perfectly well. Hey, CSS-Tricks still uses the teletype element for certain reasons. One such undead HTML relic is the align attribute in otherwise valid tags, especially images. You may see tags with a border attribute, although that attribute has long been deprecated. CSS, of course, is the preferred and modern method for that kind of styling presentation. Staying up to date with deprecation is key for any web developer. Making sure your code follows the current recommendations while avoiding legacy elements is an essential best practice. It not only ensures that your site will continue to work in the long run, but that it will play nicely with the web of the future.

http://damianfallon.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-do-some-html-elements-become_4.html

[suzanneshannon]

Why Do Some HTML Elements Become Deprecated?

The internet has been around for a long while, and over time we’ve changed the way we think about web design. Many old techniques and ways of doing things have gotten phased out as newer and better alternatives have been created, and we say that they have been deprecated.

Deprecated. It’s a word we use and see often. But have you stopped to think about what it means in practice? What are some examples of deprecated web elements, and why don’t we use them any more?

What is deprecation?

In everyday English, to “deprecate” something is to express disapproval of it. For example, you might be inclined to deprecate a news story you don’t like.

When we’re speaking in a technical sense, however, deprecation is the discouragement of use for an old feature. Often, the old feature remains functional in the interests of backward compatibility (so legacy projects don’t break). In essence, this means that you can technically still do things the legacy way. It’ll probably still work, but maybe it’s better to use the new way. 

Another common scenario is when technical elements get deprecated as a prelude to their future removal (which we sometimes call “sunsetting” a feature). This provides everybody time to transition from the old way of working to the new system before the transition happens. If you follow WordPress at all, they recently did this with their radically new Gutenberg editor. They shipped it, but kept an option available to revert to the “classic” editor so users could take time to transition. Someday, the “classic” editor will likely be removed, leaving Gutenberg as the only option for editing posts. In other words, WordPress is sunsetting the “classic” editor.

That’s merely one example. We can also look at HTML features that were once essential staples but became deprecated at some point in time.

Why do HTML elements get deprecated?

Over the years, our way of thinking about HTML has evolved. Originally, it was an all-purpose markup language for displaying and styling content online.

Over time, as external stylesheets became more of a thing, it began to make more sense to think about web development differently — as a separation of concerns where HTML defines the content of a page, and CSS handles the presentation of it.

This separation of style and content brings numerous benefits:

Avoiding duplication: Repeating code for every instance of red-colored text on a page is unwieldy and inefficient when you can have a single CSS class to handle all of it at once. 

Ease of management: With all of the presentation controlled from a central stylesheet, you can make site-wide changes with little effort.

Readability: When viewing a website’s source, it’s a lot easier to understand the code that has been neatly abstracted into separate files for content and style. 

Caching: The vast majority of websites have consistent styling across all pages, so why make the browser download those style definitions again and again? Putting the presentation code in a dedicated stylesheet allows for caching and reuse to save bandwidth. 

Developer specialization: Big website projects may have multiple designers and developers working on them, each with their individual areas of expertise. Allowing a CSS specialist to work on their part of the project in their own separate files can be a lot easier for everybody involved. 

User options: Separating styling from content can allow the developer to easily offer display options to the end user (the increasingly popular ‘night mode’ is a good example of this) or different display modes for accessibility. 

Responsiveness and device independence: separating the code for content and visual presentation makes it much easier to build websites that display in very different ways on different screen resolutions.

However, in the early days of HTML there was a fair amount of markup designed to control the look of the page right alongside the content. You might see code like this: 

<center><font face="verdana" color="#2400D3">Hello world!</font></center>

…all of which is now deprecated due to the aforementioned separation of concerns. 

Which HTML elements are now deprecated?

As of the release of HTML5, use of the following elements is discouraged:

<acronym> (use <abbr> instead)

<applet> (use <object>)

<basefont> (use CSS font properties, like font-size, font-family, etc.)

<big> (use CSS font-size)

<center> (use CSS text-align)

<dir> (use <ul>)

<font> (use CSS font properties)

<frame> (use <iframe>)

<frameset> (not needed any more)

<isindex> (not needed any more)

<noframes> (not needed any more)

<s> (use text-decoration: line-through in CSS)

<strike> (use text-decoration: line-through in CSS)

<tt> (use <code>)

There is also a long list of deprecated attributes, including many elements that continue to be otherwise valid (such as the align attribute used by many elements). The W3C has the full list of deprecated attributes.

Why don’t we use table for layouts any more?

Before CSS became widespread, it was common to see website layouts constructed with the <table> element. While the <table> element is not deprecated, using them for layout is strongly discouraged. In fact, pretty much all HTML table attributes that were used for layouts have been deprecated, such as cellpadding, bgcolor and width. 

At one time, tables seemed to be a pretty good way to lay out a web page. We could make rows and columns any size we wanted, meaning we could put everything inside. Headers, navigation, footers… you name it!

That would create a lot of website code that looked like this:

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="720"> <tr> <td colspan="10"><img name="logobar" src="logobar.jpg" width="720" height="69" border="0" alt="Logo"></td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="2" colspan="5"><img name="something" src="something.jpg" width="495" height="19" border="0" alt="A picture of something"></td> <td>Blah blah blah!</td> <td colspan="3"> <tr> <!-- and so on --> </table>

There are numerous problems with this approach:

Complicated layouts often end up with tables nested inside other tables, which creates a headache-inducing mess of code. Just look at the source of any email newsletter.

Accessibility is problematic, as screen readers tend to get befuddled by the overuse of tables.

Tables are slow to render, as the browser waits for the entire table to download before showing it on the screen.

Responsible and mobile-friendly layouts are very difficult to create with a table-based layout. We still have not found a silver bullet for responsive tables (though many clever ideas exist).

Continuing the theme of separating content and presentation, CSS is a much more efficient way to create the visual layout without cluttering the code of the main HTML document. 

So, when should we use<table>? Actual tabular data, of course! If you need to display a list of baseball scores, statistics or anything else in that vein, <table> is your friend. 

Why do we still use <b> and <i> tags?

“Hang on just a moment,” you might say. “How come bold and italic HTML tags are still considered OK? Aren’t those forms of visual styling that ought to be handled with CSS?”

It’s a good question, and one that seems difficult to answer when we consider that other tags like <center> and <s> are deprecated. What’s going on here?

The short and simple answer is that <b> and <i> would probably have been deprecated if they weren’t so widespread and useful. CSS alternatives seem somewhat unwieldy by comparison:

<style> .emphasis { font-weight:bold } </style> This is a <span class="emphasis">bold</span> word! This is a <span style="font-weight:bold">bold</span> word! This is a <b>bold</b> word!

The long answer is that these tags have now been assigned some semantic meaning, giving them value beyond pure visual presentation and allowing designers to use them to confer additional information about the text they contain.

This is important because it helps screen readers and search crawlers better understand the purpose of the content wrapped in these tags. We might italicize a word for several reasons, like adding emphasis, invoking the title of a creative work, referring to a scientific name, and so on. How does a screen reader know whether to place spoken emphasis on the word or not?

<b> and <i>have companions, including <strong>, <em> and <cite>. Together, these tags make the meaning context of text clearer:

<b> is for drawing attention to text without giving it any additional importance. It’s used when we want to draw attention to something without changing the inflection of the text when it is read by a screen reader or without adding any additional weight or meaning to the content for search engines.

<strong> is a lot like <b> but signals the importance of something. It’s the same as changing the inflection of your voice when adding emphasis on a certain word.

<i> italicizes text without given it any additional meaning or emphasis. It’s perfect for writing out something that is normally italicized, like the scientific name of an animal.

<em> is like <i> in that it italicizes text, but it provides adds additional emphasis (hence the tag name) without adding more importance in context. (‘I’m sure I didn’t forget to feed the cat’). 

<cite> is what we use to refer to the title of a creative work, say a movie like The Silence of the Lambs. This way, text is styled but doesn’t affect the way the sentence would be read aloud. 

In general, the rule is that <b> and <i> are to be used only as a last resort if you can’t find anything more appropriate for your needs. This semantic meaning allows <b> and <i> to continue to have a place in our modern array of HTML elements and survive the deprecation that has befallen other, similar style tags.

On a related note, <u> — the underline tag — was at one time deprecated, but has since been restored in HTML5 because it has some semantic uses (such as annotating spelling errors).

There are many other HTML elements that might lend styling to content, but primarily serve to provide semantic meaning to content. Mandy Michael has an excellent write-up that covers those and how they can be used (and even combined!) to make the most semantic markup possible.

Undead HTML attributes

Some deprecated elements are still in widespread use around the web today. After all, they still work — they’re just discouraged.

This is sometimes because word hasn’t gotten around that that thing you’ve been using for ages isn’t actually the way it’s done any more. Other times, it’s due to folks who don’t see a compelling reason to change from doing something that works perfectly well. Hey, CSS-Tricks still uses the teletype element for certain reasons.

One such undead HTML relic is the align attribute in otherwise valid tags, especially images. You may see <img> tags with a border attribute, although that attribute has long been deprecated. CSS, of course, is the preferred and modern method for that kind of styling presentation.

Staying up to date with deprecation is key for any web developer. Making sure your code follows the current recommendations while avoiding legacy elements is an essential best practice. It not only ensures that your site will continue to work in the long run, but that it will play nicely with the web of the future.

Questions? Post a comment! You can also find me over at Angle Studios where I work.

The post Why Do Some HTML Elements Become Deprecated? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Why Do Some HTML Elements Become Deprecated? published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[lindyhunt]

How to Write a Job Description That Attracts Awesome Applicants

As a direct response copywriter, I specialize in making readers take a specific action. I write a variety of copy, including articles, landing pages, sales emails, and job advertisements.

So, you can believe me when I show you how to write an eye-catching job description that attracts the brilliant people you want working for you.

In fact, I've written hundreds of job ads over my career. One of my first gigs was for a big employment website, where I created several ads a day. Ads that had one ultimate purpose: to compel readers to hit the “APPLY NOW” button.

My job was to make people want to press that button. My words were supposed to make them feel excited about the prospect of being in the role they were reading about.

If I could do that, consistently, I was lightning in a bottle.

This article will walk you through an approach to job descriptions that allowed me to double my conversion rate of visitors-to-applications in less than a year. Keep reading to learn the strategies and best practices I used to grip candidates, exciting them enough to take action.

How to Write a Job Description

Study your target candidate.

Optimize the job title with the keywords that candidate is using.

Start with a company summary.

Concisely describe the job's benefits.

Summarize the benefits package.

Keep the job's requirements clear and realistic.

Use strong verbs to describe the job's responsibilities.

You want to write a job ad that consistently drives candidates to fill out an application. Of course, you also want qualified applicants -- people that meet your requirements. To get them, you need them to read the entire job description before deciding if this position is a match for what they're looking for.

Before candidates settle into your ad, they’re first going to scan it. And if it’s not formatted using big, bold, clear, and concise subheads to make the scanning process effortless, they’ll move on.

The easier your job ad is to scan, the more likely it is to garner (and hold) readers' attention -- attention that ultimately leads to action.

Here’s how to attract the right people to your open position:

1. Study your target candidate.

You might've heard that people buy on emotion first, and then rationalize their purchases using logic.

Applying for a job, in that sense, is a lot like making a purchase. Pressing the “APPLY NOW” button is an emotionally charged decision.

When writing your job ad, tap into those emotions by learning everything you can about your target candidate (i.e., the person you want to be interviewing). What are his or her professional goals and aspirations? What makes him or her happy?

Example

Create a target candidate persona, or a composite of your ideal employee. (Download these buyer persona templates to get started.) Use the information you find to make potent promises that your target candidate wants to hear and, more importantly, you know you can keep.

Are you hiring for a role in content marketing? Consider aspects of your existing marketing team that you want to see reflected in your new hire. What are your current employees' career goals? What do they enjoy most about the company? Which areas of expertise do they lack that your candidate can provide?

These are all valuable pieces of information that can help you draft a corresponding job description and ensure your potential candidates would be a fit at your organization -- both culturally and professionally.

2. Optimize the job title with the keywords that candidate is using.

Every day, the job hunt leads millions of people to search millions of keywords. This makes SEO very important to the recruitment process, especially when writing job ads.

In your quest to be unique and desired, don’t make up a new, creative name for an established role. In other words, don’t call your open content marketing position an “Attention Ninja” or “Audience Crafter.”

Example

For a role in content marketing, title your job exactly what you're looking for: “Content Producer.” If you’re in the B2B space with clients all over the world, for instance, add a few more adjectives: “Global B2B Content Marketing Coordinator."

Keep in mind that the experience level of your ideal candidate can change the words they use when looking for jobs online. If you're hiring for a mid-level content marketer, for example, consider words like "strategist," "specialist," or even "manager." Is the content you produce part of a much larger digital marketing operation? Include the word "digital" -- as in "Digital Content Marketing Specialist" -- to put a finer point on all the digital channels you want your applicants to be passionate about.

Post the position under a recognizable, keyword-friendly title, as that’s what candidates will be searching.

3. Start with a company summary.

Open your job ad's main text copy with a “Company Summary” paragraph. But don't simply paste your business's "About Us" boilerplate description into your job listing. Your "Company Summary" should help to put the job for which you're hiring into context for the applicant.

If your company sells security software, for example, it won't be enough to simply state your company name, when you were founded, the types of software packages you offer, and where you're located. Your applicants will want company details that pertain to the team they'd be joining.

Here's an example of a company summary for a (shamelessly made-up) software developer that's looking for an awesome content marketing specialist to join the team:

Example

Security Software Co. is a Boston-based software developer that puts today's most pressing ecommerce security challenges at the heart of its brand. We turn the best cybersecurity technology into trusted solutions for the small online business, and after a decade serving more than 70 clients, we need someone to help us tell the stories that matter most to our customers.

If you summarize your company in a way that resonates with your ideal candidate, you'll set yourself up to dive right into the job description itself. But don't be fooled: The best job descriptions can't simply be packaged into a second paragraph following the Company Summary above.

Describe your open position using subheads, or sections, in this order:

Benefits

Requirements

Responsibilities

Here’s a breakdown of each section along with example paragraphs that, when combined, will form a “Content Marketing Specialist” job description for Security Software Co. -- the fictional company we created in the italicized paragraph above.

4. Concisely describe the job's benefits.

Every ad must start with a concise description, or overview, of the role. It should be snappy and compelling -- just be sure to complement the clear, quick explanation of the role with the job’s big-picture benefits as well.

General Electric did a nice job describing the benefits of their roles in the commercial below -- part of an amusing series to help the company shift its brand to keep up with today's digital culture. Listen to how the man in the blue sweater describes his new position:

People inherently want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Appeal to that desire by helping candidates envision the impact of their work.

If you’re hiring a software developer, explain the mark that software will leave on others. Will it help them beat traffic? Will it help them communicate better with their family? Will it help them get clean drinking water every day? Be specific. The more specific you are, the more compelling your message will be.

Here's how our fictional organization, Security Software Co., might describe the benefits of working as their newest content marketing specialist:

Example

As the Content Marketing Specialist for Security Software Co., you’ll create articles, infographics, and eBooks that build an engaged audience. Your goal will be to drive thousands of people to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn. Your success will expand Security Software’s global reach – helping millions of parents protect their children from online predators – while simultaneously developing your personal brand as a foremost expert in our space.

5. Summarize the benefits package.

Now that you have the candidate’s attention, draw him or her deeper into the ad with a section dedicated to the other benefits: your company’s benefits package -- a topic employees care about. But just know, there's a right and wrong way to write a benefits bullet ...

Use examples to help candidates envision the benefit, not just read it on the job ad. Like this:

The wrong way: “Heated parking garage.”

The right way: “Arrive and leave work comfortably, thanks to a heated garage.”

Example

At Security Software, we ask a lot of our employees, which is why we give so much in return. In addition to your competitive salary, medical/dental/vision plan, and matching 401(k), we’ll shower you with perks, including:

Dress: Wear anything you like to the office – and be as comfortable at work as you are in your own living room.

Flexibility: Two days a week, feel free to skip the commute and hit your deadlines from home.

Food: Save hundreds of dollars on food each year thanks to our well-stocked, healthy kitchen.

Location: On the days you are in the office, get here quickly thanks to our highly accessible central location.

Wellness: Stretch away the stress every morning in our in-house yoga studio.

6. Keep the job's requirements clear and realistic.

This section will be your ad’s most sterile, so don’t close with it. Stick it in the middle, sandwiched between two sections that highlight promise and opportunity.

Keep your list of requirements only as long as it needs to be. You don’t want to scare great candidates away with trivial prerequisites. You also don’t want to engage and inspire unqualified people with a shortlist.

Example

Not everyone can be a Content Marketing Specialist. To be seriously considered for this role, please have the following in regard to:

Experience: At least 3 years in a similar role with comparable goals and responsibilities (security and/or software background, preferred)

Education: Bachelor’s degree in English, Marketing, Communications, or a similar field, preferred

Skills: You must be an excellent writer, someone who understands how to frame a message in a clear, concise, and compelling way. You must also understand the mechanics of an efficient, effective Marketing Automation campaign (HubSpot experience, preferred).

Characteristics: This is an autonomous position, so you should be self-sufficient and self-motivated. It’s also a creative role, so you must be able to gracefully receive criticism and feedback about your work.

7. Use strong verbs to describe the job's responsibilities.

Responsibilities are the job. They’re the work, and the paycheck. But responsibilities can also generate excitement and promise in a passionate candidate.

Begin each bullet point of your job responsibilities with a unique yet fitting verb. For example, the role doesn’t “manage” people; it “shapes” them. The role doesn’t “oversee” projects; it “enables” their success. See the difference? One word can offer a fresh perspective, altering the reader’s frame of mind.

Example

As Security Software’s sole Content Marketer, you’ll meet the initiative’s strategic needs on your own, experimenting, learning, and adjusting as you go. Throughout your journey to grow our brand’s audience and reach, you’ll be responsible for:

Sculpting informative, entertaining, digestible articles that audiences can’t stop reading.

Designing beautiful, rich infographics that are as engaging as they are shareable.

Publishing easy-to-skim, value-driven eBooks for download in exchange for business-email addresses.

Crafting persuasive, laser-focused landing pages that compel your target audience to take one valuable action.

Purchasing targeted ad spend on well-performing social media platforms.

Pulling prospects through each stage of our marketing funnel, gradually warming them up for a productive conversation with sales.

The Final Product

Here’s what our example job ad for Security Software Co. looks like when stitched together:

Content Marketing Specialist

Security Software Co. is a Boston-based software developer that puts today's most pressing ecommerce security challenges at the heart of its brand. We turn the best cybersecurity technology into trusted solutions for the small online business, and after a decade serving more than 70 clients, we need someone to help us tell the stories that matter most to our customers.

OVERVIEW:

As the Content Marketing Specialist for Security Software Co., you’ll create articles, infographics, and eBooks that build an engaged audience. Your goal will be to drive thousands of people to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn. Your success will expand Security Software’s global reach – helping millions of parents protect their children from online predators – while simultaneously developing your personal brand as a foremost expert in our space.

BENEFITS:

At Security Software, we ask a lot of our employees, which is why we give so much in return. In addition to your competitive salary, medical/dental/vision plan, and matching 401(k), we’ll shower you with perks, including:

Dress: Wear anything you like to the office – and be as comfortable at work as you are in your own living room.

Flexibility: Two days a week, feel free to skip the commute and hit your deadlines from home.

Food: Save hundreds of dollars on food each year thanks to our well-stocked, healthy kitchen.

Location: On the days you are in the office, get here quickly thanks to our highly accessible central location.

Wellness: Stretch away the stress every morning in our in-house yoga studio.

REQUIREMENTS:

Not everyone can be a Content Marketing Specialist. To be seriously considered for this role, please have the following in regard to:

Experience: At least 3 years in a similar role with comparable goals and responsibilities (security and/or software background, preferred).

Education: Bachelor’s degree in English, Marketing, Communications, or a similar field, preferred.

Skills: You must be an excellent writer, someone who understands how to frame a message in a clear, concise, and compelling way. You must also understand the mechanics of an efficient, effective Marketing Automation campaign (HubSpot experience, preferred).

Characteristics: This is an autonomous position, so you should be self-sufficient and self-motivated. It’s also a creative role, so you have to be able to graceful receive criticism and feedback about your work.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

As Security Software’s sole Content Marketer, you’ll meet the initiative’s strategic needs on your own, experimenting, learning, and adjusting as you go. Along your journey to grow our brand’s audience and reach, you’ll be responsible for:

Sculpting informative, entertaining, digestible articles that audiences can’t stop reading.

Designing beautiful, rich infographics that are as engaging as they are shareable.

Publishing easy-to-skim, value-driven eBooks for download in exchange for business-email addresses.

Crafting persuasive, laser-focused landing pages that compel your target audience to take one valuable action.

Purchasing targeted ad spend on well-performing social media platforms.

Pulling prospects through each stage of our marketing funnel, gradually warming them up for a productive conversation with sales.

APPLY NOW

This ad, for all intents and purposes, is a generic example. It’s designed to illustrate, at a high level, the techniques that make candidates feel something when they read a job ad.

Nonetheless, it’s important to first use your knowledge of the role for which you're hiring to create an accurate ad -- one that reflects your company’s culture and specific needs.

Good luck -- although something tells me you have this one in the bag.

[holytheoristtastemaker]

The internet has been around for a long while, and over time we’ve changed the way we think about web design. Many old techniques and ways of doing things have gotten phased out as newer and better alternatives have been created, and we say that they have been deprecated. Deprecated. It’s a word we use and see often. But have you stopped to think about what it means in practice? What are some examples of deprecated web elements, and why don’t we use them any more? What is deprecation? In everyday English, to “deprecate” something is to express disapproval of it. For example, you might be inclined to deprecate a news story you don’t like. When we’re speaking in a technical sense, however, deprecation is the discouragement of use for an old feature. Often, the old feature remains functional in the interests of backward compatibility (so legacy projects don’t break). In essence, this means that you can technically still do things the legacy way. It’ll probably still work, but maybe it’s better to use the new way.  Another common scenario is when technical elements get deprecated as a prelude to their future removal (which we sometimes call “sunsetting” a feature). This provides everybody time to transition from the old way of working to the new system before the transition happens. If you follow WordPress at all, they recently did this with their radically new Gutenberg editor. They shipped it, but kept an option available to revert to the “classic” editor so users could take time to transition. Someday, the “classic” editor will likely be removed, leaving Gutenberg as the only option for editing posts. In other words, WordPress is sunsetting the “classic” editor. That’s merely one example. We can also look at HTML features that were once essential staples but became deprecated at some point in time. Why do HTML elements get deprecated? Over the years, our way of thinking about HTML has evolved. Originally, it was an all-purpose markup language for displaying and styling content online. Over time, as external stylesheets became more of a thing, it began to make more sense to think about web development differently — as a separation of concerns where HTML defines the content of a page, and CSS handles the presentation of it. This separation of style and content brings numerous benefits: Avoiding duplication: Repeating code for every instance of red-colored text on a page is unwieldy and inefficient when you can have a single CSS class to handle all of it at once.  Ease of management: With all of the presentation controlled from a central stylesheet, you can make site-wide changes with little effort. Readability: When viewing a website’s source, it’s a lot easier to understand the code that has been neatly abstracted into separate files for content and style.  Caching: The vast majority of websites have consistent styling across all pages, so why make the browser download those style definitions again and again? Putting the presentation code in a dedicated stylesheet allows for caching and reuse to save bandwidth.  Developer specialization: Big website projects may have multiple designers and developers working on them, each with their individual areas of expertise. Allowing a CSS specialist to work on their part of the project in their own separate files can be a lot easier for everybody involved.  User options: Separating styling from content can allow the developer to easily offer display options to the end user (the increasingly popular ‘night mode’ is a good example of this) or different display modes for accessibility.  Responsiveness and device independence: separating the code for content and visual presentation makes it much easier to build websites that display in very different ways on different screen resolutions. However, in the early days of HTML there was a fair amount of markup designed to control the look of the page right alongside the content. You might see code like this:  Hello world! …all of which is now deprecated due to the aforementioned separation of concerns.  Which HTML elements are now deprecated? As of the release of HTML5, use of the following elements is discouraged: (use instead) (use ) (use CSS font properties, like font-size, font-family, etc.) (use CSS font-size) (use CSS text-align) (use ) (use CSS font properties) (use ) (not needed any more) (not needed any more) (not needed any more) (use text-decoration: line-through in CSS) (use text-decoration: line-through in CSS) (use ) There is also a long list of deprecated attributes, including many elements that continue to be otherwise valid (such as the align attribute used by many elements). The W3C has the full list of deprecated attributes. Why don’t we use table for layouts any more? Before CSS became widespread, it was common to see website layouts constructed with the element. While the element is not deprecated, using them for layout is strongly discouraged. In fact, pretty much all HTML table attributes that were used for layouts have been deprecated, such as cellpadding, bgcolor and width.  At one time, tables seemed to be a pretty good way to lay out a web page. We could make rows and columns any size we wanted, meaning we could put everything inside. Headers, navigation, footers… you name it! That would create a lot of website code that looked like this: Blah blah blah! There are numerous problems with this approach: Complicated layouts often end up with tables nested inside other tables, which creates a headache-inducing mess of code. Just look at the source of any email newsletter. Accessibility is problematic, as screen readers tend to get befuddled by the overuse of tables. Tables are slow to render, as the browser waits for the entire table to download before showing it on the screen. Responsible and mobile-friendly layouts are very difficult to create with a table-based layout. We still have not found a silver bullet for responsive tables (though many clever ideas exist). Continuing the theme of separating content and presentation, CSS is a much more efficient way to create the visual layout without cluttering the code of the main HTML document.  So, when should we use? Actual tabular data, of course! If you need to display a list of baseball scores, statistics or anything else in that vein, is your friend.  Why do we still use and tags? “Hang on just a moment,” you might say. “How come bold and italic HTML tags are still considered OK? Aren’t those forms of visual styling that ought to be handled with CSS?” It’s a good question, and one that seems difficult to answer when we consider that other tags like and are deprecated. What’s going on here? The short and simple answer is that and would probably have been deprecated if they weren’t so widespread and useful. CSS alternatives seem somewhat unwieldy by comparison: .emphasis { font-weight:bold } This is a bold word! This is a bold word! This is a bold word! The long answer is that these tags have now been assigned some semantic meaning, giving them value beyond pure visual presentation and allowing designers to use them to confer additional information about the text they contain. This is important because it helps screen readers and search crawlers better understand the purpose of the content wrapped in these tags. We might italicize a word for several reasons, like adding emphasis, invoking the title of a creative work, referring to a scientific name, and so on. How does a screen reader know whether to place spoken emphasis on the word or not? and have companions, including , and . Together, these tags make the meaning context of text clearer: is for drawing attention to text without giving it any additional importance. It’s used when we want to draw attention to something without changing the inflection of the text when it is read by a screen reader or without adding any additional weight or meaning to the content for search engines. is a lot like but signals the importance of something. It’s the same as changing the inflection of your voice when adding emphasis on a certain word. italicizes text without given it any additional meaning or emphasis. It’s perfect for writing out something that is normally italicized, like the scientific name of an animal. is like in that it italicizes text, but it provides adds additional emphasis (hence the tag name) without adding more importance in context. (‘I’m sure I didn’t forget to feed the cat’).  is what we use to refer to the title of a creative work, say a movie like The Silence of the Lambs. This way, text is styled but doesn’t affect the way the sentence would be read aloud.  In general, the rule is that and are to be used only as a last resort if you can’t find anything more appropriate for your needs. This semantic meaning allows and to continue to have a place in our modern array of HTML elements and survive the deprecation that has befallen other, similar style tags. On a related note, — the underline tag — was at one time deprecated, but has since been restored in HTML5 because it has some semantic uses (such as annotating spelling errors). There are many other HTML elements that might lend styling to content, but primarily serve to provide semantic meaning to content. Mandy Michael has an excellent write-up that covers those and how they can be used (and even combined!) to make the most semantic markup possible. Undead HTML attributes Some deprecated elements are still in widespread use around the web today. After all, they still work — they’re just discouraged. This is sometimes because word hasn’t gotten around that that thing you’ve been using for ages isn’t actually the way it’s done any more. Other times, it’s due to folks who don’t see a compelling reason to change from doing something that works perfectly well. Hey, CSS-Tricks still uses the teletype element for certain reasons. One such undead HTML relic is the align attribute in otherwise valid tags, especially images. You may see tags with a border attribute, although that attribute has long been deprecated. CSS, of course, is the preferred and modern method for that kind of styling presentation. Staying up to date with deprecation is key for any web developer. Making sure your code follows the current recommendations while avoiding legacy elements is an essential best practice. It not only ensures that your site will continue to work in the long run, but that it will play nicely with the web of the future.

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