| Field | Web design |
| Went Obsolete | circa 2000 |
| Made Obsolete By | Cascading style sheets |
| Knowledge Assumed | HTML |
| When useful | Interactive web sites with very limited user formatting available |
The FONT tag was originally used to set the font, size, and color of text on HTML webpages. However, HTML was designed as a semantic markup language, with markup describing what a page means instead of what it looks like. With the availability of the FONT tag, many people would use big fonts instead of, say, the HTML tags for headings. (Technologies such as search engines, screen readers, automatic web page indexers, and such are not able to determine the meaning of a font unambiguously, if at all.)
Cascading style sheets allowed a distinction between content and presentation. A series of rules would allow the web designer to, for example, set all level-2 headings to be a medium-sized bold italic sans-serif font. These rules could furthermore be shared between a set of different, related web pages on a single site, and updated in one location (instead of in every single heading).
The FONT tag, though obsolete, is still widely used in low-quality web design.