Note: This reiterates something I posted awhile back. It's back at m_turner's suggestion, in a slightly modified form.
The <small> tag is regrettably overused on Everything. It really has few legitimate uses; it's unfortunate that it is so often put to illegitimate ones. The problem is this: it makes text hard to read. Kinda obvious when you stop to think about it, isn't it? And why is that a bad thing? Well, because most noders want others to read their works. The thing is, between the inherent difficulty of reading on a computer screen and the short attention spans of internet users, it's a really bad idea to make it any harder for the rest of us to read your writeups.
At heart, the issue has some philosophical significance. The web was created, and is most useful, as an information conveyance. HTML doesn't have the tools necessary to do page layout because that's not its purpose. And thus, when you start messing around with tags that affect the physical presentation of the text (like <small>) rather than marking its significance, you're outside the realm of what HTML was designed for.
When you violate the rules, there are consequences.
You see, since HTML lacks page formatting tools, you have no way of ensuring that users see what you expect them to. Different people will be accessing your writings with different hardware, running different web browsers, each item configured differently from your setup. What looks fine in the scratch pad on a Windows setup, under Internet Explorer, at 1024x768 resolution, looks entirely different on someone else's Linux laptop, running konqueror at 800x600.
You can't take other peoples' settings for granted. Myself, I like to fit as much as possible on my screen. Setting my screen for 1600x1200 allows me to have two full browser windows side by side, and coupled with small text, I can fit an enormous amount on the screen at a time. The consequence is that my default font size is only slightly larger than illegible. A single <small> requires me to squint to read the text.
That's okay sometimes. It doesn't matter much if I can't read a citation without a certain effort. I don't mind it when the <small> tag is used appropriately. But far too often, writeups appear with entire paragraphs inexplicably <small>ed. Or punchlines of jokes. Sometimes even the entire writeup. Other times, people nest small tags. Now, 10pt arial, under two small tags, is illegible in the most literal use of the word. The line of text is approximately three pixels high.
We're here in order to exchange writings, which is why our palette of HTML gewgaws is limited. Using <small> tags for other purposes than the intended - footnotes, citations, those other things that don't comprise the meat of the writeup - is incorrect use of HTML. It's annoying for a lot of the people who read your writeups. It's extremely presumptuous - don't impose your display preferences on your readers.
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