On Fri, 24 Mar 2006, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> 
> It's a holdover from HTML 3.2. It isn't even legacy markup, since it has 
> been used very little; it exists in theory only.

According to my studies it's used in around 0.1% of the Web's pages. One 
in every thousand pages isn't bad, given how few pages could be expected 
to be defining terms; In particular, it's used more than <ins>, <del>, 
<var>, <samp>, <bdo>, etc.

Then again, it's used less than <blink>, <bgsound>, <marquee>, <spacer>. 
So maybe that doesn't mean so much.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/        U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'