 | Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide |  |
Tuesday 21st of May 2013 10:22:41 AM
One can read only so much before it comes time to join a discussion and ask some questions. There are two major venues for discussions about CSS, but each is concerned with a specific type of discussion -- so make sure you go to the right place.
This Usenet group, often abbreviated as ciwas (pronounced "see-wass"), is the gathering place for CSS authors. A number of experts in the field check this newsgroup regularly, this author among them, and all are there for one primary reason: to help new CSS authors over the hurdles that learning any new language will generate. The secondary reason is for the spirited debates that occasionally erupt over some aspect of CSS, or a browser's implementation thereof. Rather unusually for a newsgroup, the signal-to-noise ratio stayed fairly high for the last few years of the 1990s, and will with any luck continue in that vein.
Anyone who wishes to be involved in discussing the future course of CSS, and to clearing up ambiguities in the specifications, should subscribe to this list. The members of the list are all, in one fashion or another, interested in making CSS better than it is already. Please note: www-style is not the place to ask for assistance with writing CSS. For help with CSS authoring problems, visit ciwas instead. Questions beginning with "How do I ... ?" are frowned upon by the regulars of www-style and are usually redirected to a more appropriate forum such as ciwas. On the other hand, questions that begin "Why can't I ... ?" or "Wouldn't it be cool if ... ?" are generally welcome, so long as they relate to some ability that appears to be missing from CSS.
As we saw in the preceding section, a scaling factor is the best way to avoid the kinds of inheritance problems you encounter with length measures for line-height. It would therefore seem that using a number is always preferred. Alas, this is not necessarily so. Internet Explorer 3 will interpret a scaling factor as a pixel value, so you get something like what's shown in Figure 4-29.
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floated elements) is an inline element. Setting box properties for inline elements gets into even more interesting territory than we've already covered. Some good examples of inline elements are the EM tag and the A tag, both of which are nonreplaced elements, and images, which are replaced elements.Now for the stuff that is found inside the STYLEtag. First, we have something very similar toLINK: the@import directive. Just likeLINK, @import can be used todirect the web browser to load an external style sheet and use itsthe document. In other words, if an image is floated up into aprevious paragraph, it may simply overwrite whatever was alreadythere. On the other hand, the user agent may handle the situation byflowing content around the float, even though doing so isn'trequired behavior. Either way, it's probably a bad idea tocount on a particular behavior, which makes the utility of negativemargins on floats rather limited. Hanging floats are probably fairlysafe, but trying to push an element upward on the page is generally abad idea.
background: white url(pix/grstripe.gif) repeat-y top left;}For the anchors, among other things, we need to know the color valueof the green being used. The art department reports that thisparticular shade of green uses no red or blue, and just 40% green;someone there has had the foresight to use web-safe colors.(Remember, this is a hypothetical situation.) We want to do the samefor the visited links, so we write:
A:link {color: rgb(0%,40%,0%);}A:visited {color: rgb(20%,20%,20%);}