Read at your own risk
2011 October 1/10:32 PM
This document dates from the early web period, and is kept for archival purposes only. It is no longer updated, and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.Web browsers ignore html tags that they don’t understand. If you have no taste, you can use <BLINK> to your heart’s content. Netscape will show it, and others will ignore it. This is one half of the essence of designing web pages for the reader, rather than designing them for the designer: write pages that are still readable even if your browser-specific tags are ignored.
When it comes to more involved html tags, you’ll have to be a little more careful. If the tag is well-designed, it will scale to browsers that don’t understand it. If it doesn’t work on browsers that don’t understand it, it isn’t well designed, and you should avoid it. It will only cause problems in the future.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make sure that if any directive is ignored, your page will still look good to the reader.
The other half of “the essence” of writing for the reader is to use tags that confer meaning, rather than tags that confer typography. If you specify that your headline is bold, with 18-point type, it might look exactly the same as the “h1” headline tag on your browser but to computers it is completely different. One is just some text. The other is the most important headline in your document. You can choose to italicize a word, or you can choose to emphasize it; on your browser, these choices might be the same, but to a search engine or a blind person’s text reader, one is just typography. The other means emphasis. One applies only to print, the other applies to any means of conveying your page to the human or computer on the other end.
