It's best to do it the other way , for validity purposes. The <font> tag has been removed for quite some time, in favor of css. Yeah, it still works, but as far as validity is concerned, that is NOT valid html.
Fair enough. HTML isn't my strong suit, so I'll take your word on that. It just seemed simpler and has worked w/o any issues for me.
But for TC, I'd go ahead and do what wolfstream suggested.