Upon visiting an older site it can be common to find deprecated tags and attributes. Yet as the are deprecated and not obsolete, they are still valid and supported. A ‘good’ programmer tends to stay away from these if at all possible, yet just how bad is it to use these?
Upon looking up information about deprecated elements, I find the most common information supplied is:
Browsers should continue to support deprecated tags and attributes,
but eventually these tags are likely to become obsolete and so future
support cannot be guaranteed.
Obviously if something breaks you should change it. Yet should we actively change instances of deprecated elements in code we had worked on previously? Either a personal site, or a huge site with a huge view rate, just how important is it to stay as up-to-date on accepted elements?
How much warning after a tag or attribute becomes deprecated is given when it is decided it will become obsolete? Any? What about other web formats?
On any site, be it an over-haul, or just noticing a line of deprecated code, should it all be actively removed? Or is it worth the saved time and energy to just wait until is is truly dropped and change it all at once?
Should you lazy (like I wish I could be), or is it worth the effort to be that up-to-date?
It’s always important to be lazy, that’s why we have tags marked as deprecated instead of just removed.
I always tell developers to be lazy, but only lazy enough to not stop yourself from preventing yourself from doing good things. There’s such a thing as too lazy, and such a thing as not lazy enough. DRY is an example of good lazy. Relying on deprecated tags is an example of bad lazy. Using divs for table layout is an example of inefficient overwork.
If you’re doing maintenance, and it’s a bug report, it’s always important to fix it, obviously, but in the case of being proactive, the question becomes, what’s the most important thing for you to do right now. If you have some 20% time and you want to fix it, then fix it. If you have tasks that need to be done, then you need to focus on those first.
This is really what you’re asking about. On your own personal site, that’s definitely 20% time, so do that as you want.
On a massive site with lots of throughput, you need to try and keep it up to date so it continues to offer good benefit to the users. If the site suddenly stops working for lots of users, they’re going to stop coming. Then a massive site with lots of throughput turns into a dead site taking up space on the internet.