Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

Appendix B. HTML 2.0 Style Sheet

The style sheet provided in this chapter was excerpted from the CSS1 specification and is included here to give authors an idea of how legacy browser behavior in handling HTML can be reproduced, or at least approximated, using CSS1 rules. A thorough understanding of this style sheet is a good first step to understanding how CSS1 operates. The simpler HTML 2.0 style sheet is reproduced here in order to minimize complexity and possible confusion. A suggested style sheet for HTML 3.2 is also available on the W3C web site, as part of the CSS2 specification.

 BODY {
margin: 1em;
font-family: serif;
line-height: 1.1;
background: white;
color: black;
}
H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, P, UL, OL, DIR, MENU, DIV,
DT, DD, ADDRESS, BLOCKQUOTE, PRE, BR, HR { display: block }
XML documents are also naturally committed to a database (relational or object) or any other kind of XML document store. There are commercial products available which allow you to save XML documents to an XML storage layer (which is not a database per se), like Datachannel's XStore and ODI's eXcelon. These XML store solutions are quite expensive ($10,000 to $20,000 range).


XML documents are also quite naturally retrieved from a persistence layer (databases, file systems, XML stores). This lends XML to be used in real world applications where the information being used by different parts of a system is the most important thing.

XML is platform independent, textual information



Information in an XML document is stored in plain-text. This might seem like a restriction if were thinking of embedding binary information in an XML document. There are several advantages to keeping things plain text. First, it is easy to write parsers and all other XML enabling technology on different platforms. Second, it makes everything very interoperable by staying with the lowest common denominator approach. This is the whole reason the web is so successful despite all its flaws. By accepting and sending information in plain text format, programs running on disparate platforms can communicate with each other. This also makes it easy to integrate new programs on top of older ones (without rewriting the old programs), by simply making the interface between the new and old program use XML.

For example, if you have an address book document stored in an XML file, created on a Mac, that you would like to share with someone who has a PC, you can simply email them the plain text address book XML document. This cant be done with binary encoded information which is totally platform (and program) dependent.
B, STRONG, I, EM, CITE, VAR, TT, CODE, KBD, SAMP,
IMG, SPAN { display: inline }
LI { display: list-item }
H1, H2, H3, H4 { margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em }
H5, H6 { margin-top: 1em }
H1 { text-align: center }
H1, H2, H4, H6 { font-weight: bold }
H3, H5 { font-style: italic }
H1 { font-size: xx-large }
H2 { font-size: x-large }
H3 { font-size: large }
B, STRONG { font-weight: bolder } /* relative to the parent */
I, CITE, EM, VAR, ADDRESS, BLOCKQUOTE { font-style: italic }
PRE, TT, CODE, KBD, SAMP { font-family: monospace }
PRE { white-space: pre }
ADDRESS { margin-left: 3em }
BLOCKQUOTE { margin-left: 3em; margin-right: 3em }
UL, DIR { list-style: disc }
OL { list-style: decimal }
MENU { margin: 0 }      /* tight formatting */
LI { margin-left: 3em }
DT { margin-bottom: 0 }
DD { margin-top: 0; margin-left: 3em }
HR { border-top: solid }   /* 'border-bottom' could also have been used */
A:link { color: blue }    /* unvisited link */
A:visited { color: red }   /* visited links */
A:active { color: lime }   /* active links */
/* setting the anchor border around IMG elements
requires contextual selectors */
A:link IMG { border: 2px solid blue }
A:visited IMG { border: 2px solid red }
A:active IMG { border: 2px solid lime }

A.4. Bug Reporting		C. CSS1 Properties

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11.1.1. Case 1: Consistent Look and Feel

In this project, we will create anexternal style sheet that will define a basic, consistent look andfeel for an entire corporate web site. Our main goal is to createstyles that are as simple as possible, using few (if any) classes orIDs. For the purposes of the project, we will assume there is astandard writing guide for employees of the company: document titlesare in H1, subheadings in H2,every page uses standard graphics at the top, and so forth. defined in CSS.

This is used to declare the type of bullet numbering system to be used in either an unordered or ordered list, depending on the value specified. This property applies to elements with a display value of list-item.

UL {list-style-type: square;}
Figure 6-10. The result of combining author styles and browser styles
Since there is a color value defined by thebrowser for TABLE elements, it will takeprecedence over the inherited value. This is annoying andunnecessary, but it is an obstacle to be overcome. You can overcomeit (usually) with selectors that list various table elements. Forexample, in order to get all your table content to be red along withyour document's body, try this:
BODY, TABLE, TD, TH {color: red;}
bottom edges permits the behavior in Figure 8-40.
WARNING
In practice, some browsers do not do this correctly. Instead, theywill increase the height of a parent element so that the floatedelement is contained within it, even though this results in a greatdeal of extra blank space within the parent element.
A related topic is the subject of backgrounds and their relationship

font-style

Values

italic | oblique |
normal