Are the colspan and rowspan attributes for TD and TH tags deprecated?
Thanks.
~TehYoyo
No it isnāt but HTML5 doesnāt even have such a thing/term as ādeprecatedā anyway it letās anything inā¦ LOL
Off Topic:
I think the term they use is āviolatedā 
It would be a bit hard to create a complicated table without them 
What makes you think they were deprecated?
1 Like
I just assume most attributes that affect appearance are deprecated now 
Thanks everyone.
~TehYoyo
Not appearance: meaning. Having a row span two or more rows changes the meaning of the data inside, how it relates to the other data in the table. Which is why itās not considered presentational (unless youāre doing a layout table, lawlz).
Uhā¦noā¦of course not! 
~TehYoyo
False assumption, because the effect on appearance is NOT what tags MEAN, and not all tags were deprecated for appearance reasons!
DIR and MENU for example were removed just because they were redundant to UL. APPLET was deprecated and the proprietary EMBED and BGSOUND properties were not adopted in favor of OBJECT, which in the next HTML iteration was also supposed to also supplant IMG.
No joke, we were supposed to stop using IMG for OBJECT, and could have if IEās implementation of object wasnāt STILL broken even in IE10 ā the idea was so that as new file formats (like sayā¦ jpeg2k) came along they could easily be added via plugins to the various browsersā¦ Which is a great idea, beats the tar out of this ālets hardcode it into a VIDEO or AUDIO tagā bullcookies which seems to exist JUST so the browser makers can pimp their favorite formats/encoders.
In terms of āpresentationā we saw more attributes get axed than tags. WIDTH, HEIGHT and ALIGN on anything other than OBJECT, IMG, and āTABLE elementsā are gone, BORDER, HSPACE, VSPACE, BACKGROUND, BGCOLOR, TEXT, LINK, ALINK, VLINK, FACE, TYPE (on lists), START, COMPACT ā goneā¦ and of course the only non-presentational attribute thatās gone is TARGET, since thatās accessibility rubbish ā so naturally the scripttards go and use js to piss on accessibility instead and of course itās ābackā in 5. Way to go guys.
Look at deprecated tags for presentation ā thereās CENTER, BASEFONT, FONTā¦ andā¦ andā¦ S and STRIKE?
NO!!! S and STRIKE were removed as redundant to DEL!
U? Not entirely.
Letās actually look at the list of deprecated tags:
APPLET ā redundant to OBJECT
BASEFONT ā presentation
CENTER ā presentation
DIR ā redundant to UL
FONT ā presentation
FRAME ā bad for accessibility.
FRAMESET ā bad for accessibility.
IFRAME ā bad for accessibility and possible security hole
ISINDEX ā redundant to INPUT
MENU ā redundant to UL
NOFRAMES ā duh, frames again.
S ā redundant to DEL
STRIKE ā redundant to DEL
U ā removed because only links should be underlined in STRICT conforming documents, and in some cases being redundant to CITE, EM or STRONG.
ā¦ and thatās IT for the deprecated tags. Thatās all of them. Out of the fourteen deprecated tags, only three were truly 100% removed for being presentational, and three more could be argued as presentational but also as either redundant or bad for accessibility. Seven tags were removed as redundant, four for being bad accessibilityā¦
ā¦ and yet people always focus on the āpresentationalā reason ā when itās actually the smallest of them so far as tags are concerned.
Other tags that people think of as āstrictlyā presentation also have grammatical/semantic meanings, or fill the gap when no appropriate semantic tag is availible. B and I are still in there because there are reasons content would in normal print be bold or underlined WITHOUT receiving āemphasisā or āmore emphasisā (EM and STRONG respectively). SMALL and BIG are still in there for when size changes have meaning not conveyed by other tags ā they do not neccessarily MEAN presenting it as Bold, Italic, Small or Big, it simply implies that gramattically you might make them such ā just as sub and sup have a presentational meaning, they also have a grammatical one! Small for example is great for de-emphasis inside a heading (such as a tagline which is part of the heading and NOT a new heading OR separate content) since we donāt have a de-emphasis element. Think about the tags that were removed for presentational reasons ā does centering text change itās meaning or imply any meaning semantically that couldnāt be said by sayā¦ a heading tag? You center text in a paragraph, itās still a paragraph; you center text in a heading, itās still a heading! FONT canāt imply meaningā¦ thatās just presentationā¦ but B or I could be a company title, book title, it implies thereās something DIFFERENT about the text itās applied to. Unlike span which is for presentation where thereās actually nothing noteworthy about the text to apply any meaning to.
Great example a friend of mine made years ago:
<b><i>GURPS,</i></b> <b>Steve Jackson Gamesā</b> flagship role-playing game, was first released in 1985. Several licensed adaptations of other companiesā games exist for the system, such as <b><i>GURPS Bunnies and Burrows.</i></b> However, <b>SJ Games</b> has no connection with <b>Wizards of the Coast</b>, producers of the <i>Dungeons and Dragons</i> RPG. <em>No <b><i>GURPS,</i></b> content is open-source.</em> <strong>Do not plagiarize <b>SJ Games</b> work!</strong>
Shows them all four used for what they are actually FOR! B and I mean bold or italic for grammatical reasons ā and do NOT mean that they HAVE to be presented to the user as bold or italic since not all devices HTML was meant to output to can even HANDLE bold or italic; itās that separation that appears to confuse people.
Because again, if you are choosing your tags based on their default appearance or behavior, you are probably choosing the wrong tags!
Though try telling that to the folks whoāve not pulled their heads out of 1997ās backside or the HTML 5 {nasty string of expletives omitted}ā¦
I stopped reading after the list. Sorry?
But thanks, DS. How stupid of me :eyeroll:
~TehYoyo
Itās back in again. For two reasons:
reason number retard is, WYSIWYGs still use it. I donāt get that one at all.
reason number two, though, has a pointā¦ Chinese proper nouns. Since none of us are writing Chinese, though, we shouldnāt be using <u>
I thought big was out?
Small Iāve always thought was perfect for legalese, and Iām glad the HTML5 people kept it in the spec pretty much for that reason. Wow. A reasonable move!
Deathshadow was referring to what is in or out in HTML 4. I(t is at least a decade or so too soon to know what will actually be in or out in HTML 5.
I still thought <big> was out though.
Nope, because like small itās useful for when should be grammatically larger or emphasized without receiving emphasis or being a heading. Thatās the ālogical disconnectā I think most people have with semantics ā they canāt wrap their head around the notion of ābigā, āsmallā, āboldā and āitalicā having semantic meanings completely unrelated to their presentational default appearanceā¦ because those appearances may not even exist on the target device. Though at least thatās easier to explain with B or I because itās pretty simple to come up with examples of thoseā¦ like book titles and company names which are made bold or italic for grammatical reasons; we donāt need a perfect semantic tag for every one of those cases ā that would just be over-complicating the specification for something that can be done with a lot less hassle.
Like HTML 5 is trying to do with all itās extra tags for nothing.
Both tags are also useful when making a reference to the rapper <big><small>Biggie Smalls</small></big>.
Sorry , I donāt even like rap but I couldnāt resist.
Haha nice, d_p. Sigh. Semantics.
~TehYoyo