S - Strike-through Text

The S element, deprecated in HTML 4.0, suggests that text be rendered with a strike-through style. In many cases, use of a phrase element such as DEL is more appropriate since such elements express the meaning of the text more clearly. However, since support for DEL among browsers is weak, S could be useful in combination with DEL, as in the following example:

The latest version of HTML recommended by the W3C is HTML <DEL DATETIME="1997-12-19T00:00:00-05:00"><S>3.2</S></DEL> <INS DATETIME="1997-12-19T00:00:00-05:00">4.0</INS>.

Note that STRIKE is better supported than S (based on Netscape 2.x and 1.22 supporting STRIKE but not S), and so STRIKE should be used in place of S. There does not appear to be any advantage to using both STRIKE and S; all browsers that support S also seem to support STRIKE.

If DEL is not a suitable structure, style sheets should be used to complement or replace instances of S. CSS1 provides the text-decoration property for strike-through text.

More Information

• S in W3C HTML 4.0 Recommendation

Copyright © 1998 by Liam Quinn. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).