Have any deprecated elements or attributes ever been completely abandoned?

Question

I know the "align" attribute of the <div> tag has been deprecated for some time now, as well as many other attributes. But you can still use it in all browsers. Has any browser ever made a step to actually not support deprecated elements of any kind?

The reason I ask is because I stopped using div align not just because it's frowned upon, but because I thought some day it would be abandoned and unsupported, as oppose to just throwing warnings in my IDE.

Answer 1

<basefont>

Dropped in Firefox.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3875

Answer 2

Most depreciated elements take several revisions to be worked out "completely". This is because in the interest of backwards compatibility new browsers retain code for handling these elements. Most browsers try to avoid this in an effort to retain their own share of the market. As long as the elements are still used generally then there will most likely be some level of support for them so not to lose those that want to access the content that uses them.

Answer 3

No, there is no evidence of any deprecated element having been dropped from browsers. Besides, what you ask in the text of your question is about a deprecated attribute, not an element. The answer is the same, though.

Answer 4

I recall battling with the <layer> element back in the days of Netscape 4. There were definitely web pages that depended on it, but it's long gone.

But <layer> was never standardized, and I am not aware of anything that was in the HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2 or HTML 4.01 standards that has been completely abandoned by HTML5. Sometimes though, implementation requirements are written in such a way that doesn't actually require the browser to do what you'd expect of it or be consistent with what other browsers do. <blink> is one such element. <keygen> is another.

Note that HTML5 doesn't have "deprecated" elements and attributes, only "obsolete" ones. What this means is that the expectation is that browsers will support them forever, but that web authors should not use them because there are better ways of doing the same thing, or that they are harmful to either authors or users to have them on the page.