This paragraph was taken from a very popular essay about the FONT tag: http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/font.html.
Though the Web has changed a great deal since 1996, the FONT element is still around, and still exhibits all the harmful effects described below, even in modern browsers. Fortunately, Style Sheets are much more widespread than they were, and these can avoid most of the harmful effects of the FONT element.
When Netscape introduced its FONT element, with its SIZE= and COLOR= attributes, many web authors welcomed the promise of control over the presentation of their documents; the same authors felt a twinge of anticipation when Microsoft introduced an additional FACE= attribute. Many of these authors did not realize that their documents would become invisible, illegible, or inaccessible to many viewers. Yet this is exactly what has happened, due to mistaken expectations and faulty implementation in popular browsers.