Oreilly has a great way of making the <font></font>
tag non-functional in cases where the content may contain it (for uncontrollable reasons):
Mind you, this won’t validate properly, but it will disable the usefulness of the tag itself.
Add the following to your CSS definitions
font { color: inherit ;
background: inherit ;
font-family: inherit ;
font-size: inherit ; }
Recommended ‘simple’ replacement for the tag (when you don’t have time to restructure the entire site) is to use the <span></span>
tag with appropriate styles to replace all instances of the <font></font>
tag in the markup.