Why would Google use a font tag?

css, html, minify, web-standards

Solution

Saving a few bytes on the Google homepage likely saves them terabytes of transfer bandwidth.

Problem

So, I couldn't help noticing while demonstrating Chrome's DOM browser thing to my brother, that Google uses a `<font size=-2>` tag. I know this is a stupid question, but from a programming point of view--why would they use a deprecated tag on Google? Is it because it's smaller than using `<p class="whatever">` and then creating a style for it, or just going `<p style="font-size: x-small">`?

Original source