DEPRECATED EXAMPLE:
The following HTML fragment illustrates the use of the deprecated attributes. It sets the background color of the canvas to white, the text foreground color to black, and the color of hyperlinks to red initially, fuchsia when activated, and maroon once visited.

!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC 
   "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

HTML>
HEAD>
 TITLE>A study of population dynamics/TITLE>
/HEAD>

BODY bgcolor="white" text="black"
  link="red" alink="fuchsia" vlink="maroon">

  ... document body...

/BODY>
/HTML>

Using style sheets, the same effect could be accomplished as follows:


HTML>
HEAD>
 TITLE>A study of population dynamics/TITLE>
 STYLE type="text/css">
  BODY { background: white; color: black}
  A:link { color: red }
  A:visited { color: maroon }
  A:active { color: fuchsia }
 /STYLE>
/HEAD>

BODY>

  ... document body...

/BODY>
/HTML>

Using external (linked) style sheets gives you the flexibility to change the presentation without revising the source HTML document: