Font Tags Considered Harmful... but probably not by me
By the
way, I didn't actually do this...I just know it's a common scenario.
Darren is right, and I can speak from direct experience. Although perhaps you would not call one page "difficult" to troubleshoot for font tags, try 25 or 30 pages. And they have to be done in an hour because the pages are going live at 3:00.
If you are not an HTML designer and you naively drop a font tag into a document that is controlled by style sheets, and the style changes, then suddenly that paragraph (or word or headline) is wrong and someone (used to be me) wades in and tries to troubleshoot why. Worse, you don't find it and the client calls to ask why his pretty new redesign has a big ugly font blot on page X.
Whenever you write something, be it html or jpt(just plain text!), you have to assume that it will be worked on by someone other than yourself at some point.
Pages are rarely written once, by one person, with one tool. That is why you have to keep the code clean and pristine.
OK, one more thing. You may think that you don't need to worry about it because you are a one guy office and you use FrontPage or Dreamweaver or whatever to do all of your html. But your company grows, and they need a to link content to a database and they want to bring in professional html house. If you have kept your code clean, the programmers may be able to come in and do that one job without redesigning your site. If you haven't, it will likely be cheaper to trash your work and start from scratch. The question is, do you want to take the small amount (relatively) of extra time to do it right, or do you want to pay someone $10-$20K to fix it later.
g ..
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