XHTML strict? Not!

The World Wide Web Consortium (commonly known as W3C and located on the web at www.w3.org) has deprecated many parts of HTML. The idea they promote is that HTML should be content and CSS should be used for describing the presentation. I heartily object.

HTML, with its simple and direct formatting tags, such as <center>, is a marvelous tool for those who are not web professionals but still have something to say online. Your local butcher, baker and candlestick maker can use HTML to put up a website about their respective professions. Working HTML skills can be acquired in an hours' self-training via the many HTML tutorials freely available online.

Your local Girl Scouts can create an HTML-only website where the troops' cookie sales are posted. The Youth Soccer league can post schedules and results at its entirely-HTML website. It's easy and it's accessible to persons in all walks of life.

The W3C decision, that CSS is required for creating a website, adds significantly to the complexity of what is and should be simple. It limits the web to professional webmasters, for whom an understanding of CSS is a required part of the tools they bring to the job. Certainly webmasters deserve great respect for the work they do, but the webmaster's skill set should not be required by the Girl Scout leader or Youth Soccer volunteer.

I've done software for many years. You learn to avoid the deprecated features. But I'm not one bit worried about using <center> when I want something centered. Sooner or later W3C will wake up and realize that its responsibility includes butchers, bakers and Girl Scouts, not just professional webmasters. (Or some other organization will become the standard setter for butchers', bakers' and Girl Scouts' websites.)

In the meantime, <center> and the other deprecated tags all have full support from the browsers we all use. Every day a million happy amateurs, myself included, add millions of new <center>s to our web pages ensuring that our browsers will fully support <center> many, many years from now. The W3C is, fortunately, powerless to enforce its deprecations.

We need an authority that looks out for the non-professional. Instead of deprecating <center> we should add <left> and <right> tags. Instead of saying "use CSS, not tables" we should add HTML spacer elements for simple, non-CSS formatting. And we should never, no not ever, introduce such lunacy as "replace your <br> tags with <br />". (Happily, HTML5 deprecates <br /> in favor of plain <br>.)

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