Early versions of HTML were concerned with the structure of the content, headings, paragraphs, lists, tables and the like.
It was not long before attributes to specify the style of the content were developed. This included colour and font size attributes.
| Tag | Attribute | Value | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| ol | type | A | i |
| ul | type | circle | square |
Visit the w3schools Home Page or their CSS Tutorial.
The explosion of attributes and attribute values soon made it a slow and difficult process to create elaborate web pages. Cascading Style Sheets were introduced to reduce the burden by allowing style settings to be separated from the structure. In this example, you see the same basic HTMl taking on different styles as a result of using specifications in a style sheet. Elements of HTML gained properties which could be defined in the style sheet.
Tags and attributes of HTML are said to be deprecated in XHTML and HTML5. Some disappeared while others took on new forms particularly in the definition of properties.
The type attribute used in lists is deprecated in that there is now a list-style property with a set of new values replacing the previous type attribute values.
And the fun is just beginning!