Hi Ammon...
I go along with a part of what you said. <FONT> is deprecated for some good reasons, in favour of CSS controls. But CSS isn't a "related issue", it's the same issue... the only means of replacing <FONT> with <SPAN> or <DIV> is by using them to embed or refer to CSS controls.
What is more, the biggest gain for replacing <FONT> with CSS controls is to liberate a page from its formatting, thus allowing a page or a whole site to take on almost any appearance by swapping or modifying a stylesheet. That worthy objective isn't achieved by moving the effects applied by the <FONT> tag into the Style attribute of a <SPAN>/<DIV> tag. Rather the <SPAN>/<DIV> tag must be given a Class and/or ID which is referenced in an external stylesheet.
Little is ever cut and dry, however. CSS controls are often not read by mobile devices which will happily read a <FONT> tag. Ultimately all formatting, from the layout of a page to the borders around a table should be under the control of a stylesheet; but "preserve standards compatibility" is a slightly dangerous phrase, since the CSS controls are often less cross-browser compliant than the alternative HTML controls.
In fact, Petrik, taking full advantage of styles in the HTML editor is not an easy business, because it should mean that the editor reads all the styles from CSS files and embedded within the <HEAD> section of the document, puts them into a drop-down menu of the editor for selection, and somehow applies them faithfully within the editor WYSIWYG view. At the end of the day, <FONT> is deprecated, but I doubt it's going to exit stage left and leave us in the lurch any time soon.
Best regards
- Andi