About Obsolete Elements in HTML...
= Index DOT Html by Brian Wilson =

Justification

The use of these block-like elements is not recommended. They were marked as deprecated/"obsolete" in the HTML 2.0, 3.0 and 3.2 versions and do not appear in HTML 4.0 and beyond at all. Browsers still implement support for these elements for compatibility with existing documents and it is unlikely that this support will ever actually be withdrawn from existing browsers in the future.

Usage

[ <Listing>, <Plaintext>, <Xmp> ]

These elements allow content to be displayed "as-is" in the document by stopping regular HTML parsing until the closing element is found. The PRE element is now the recommended replacement for these elements.

Related Sites

Official References

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt

RFC 1866: The HTML 2.0 specification (plain text)

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec

The web version of the HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866) specification

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Wilbur/

The HTML 3.2 (Wilbur) recommendation
[Includes the deprecated "obsolete" elements]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/html/reference/elements.asp

Internet Explorer Tag reference
[Details deprecated element usage in Internet Explorer]