 | Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide |  |
Thursday 23rd of May 2013 10:28:08 AM
In the previous chapter, we covered a great deal of information on how CSS handles the visual formatting of a document. However, we did this in a mostly practical fashion: lots of explanation about how things work, with only a little lip service paid to the questions of why. In this chapter, we turn to the theoretical side of visual rendering, with only occasional references to the practical.
You may wonder why it's necessary to spend an entire chapter on the theoretical underpinnings of visual rendering in CSS. The main reason is to cover all the bases. I attempted to provide as many and varied examples as possible in the previous chapters, but with a model as open and powerful as that contained within CSS, no book could hope to cover every possible way of combining properties and effects. Every reader of this book will obviously go on to discover new ways of using CSS for their own document effects.
In the course of so doing, you may encounter what seems like strange behavior on the part of user agents. With a thorough grasp of how the visual rendering model works in CSS, you'll be able to determine whether the behavior is a correct (if unexpected) consequence of the rendering engine CSS defines or whether you've stumbled across a bug that needs to be reported. (See Appendix A, "CSS Resources", for details on how to report problems with rendering engines.)
In the rendering of elements, CSS assumes that every element generates one or more rectangular boxes, called element boxes . (Future versions of the specification may allow for nonrectangular boxes, but for now everything is rectangular.) Each element box consists of a content area at its core. This content area is surrounded by optional amounts of padding, borders, and margins. These are considered optional because all could be set to a width of zero, effectively removing them from the element box. An example content area is shown in Figure 8-1, along with the surrounding regions of padding, border, and margins.
Each of the margins, borders, and padding can be set using various properties, such as margin-left or border-bottom. The content's background (for example, a color or tiled image) is also applied to the padding, while the margins are always transparent, allowing the background of any parent elements to be visible. In effect, the margins simulate the HSPACE and VSPACE attributes of images, although in a much more sophisticated fashion. Padding cannot be set to a negative value, but margins can. The effects of negative margins are explored later in this chapter.
The borders, on the other hand, have their own rules. Borders are generated using defined styles, such as solid or inset, and their color can be set using the border-color property. If no color is set, then the color of the border is based on the foreground color of the element's content. For example, if the text of a paragraph is white, then any borders around that paragraph will be white, unless a different border color is explicitly declared by the author. If a border style has "gaps" of some type, then the element's background is visible through those gaps; in other words, the border has the same background as the content and padding. Finally, the width of a border can never be negative.
There are differences in how different types of elements are formatted, however. Block-level elements are not treated in the same way that inline elements are, for example, and floated elements introduce a whole new level of complexity. Let's examine each type of element in turn.
App servers traditionally give their client apps access to information in remote databases, remote file systems, remote object repositories, remote web resources, and even other app servers. All these information sources don't even need to reside on the machine that hosts the app server. These remote resources may be on other machines on the Intranet or the Internet. Using Java and XML, RMI, JDBC, CORBA, JNDI, Servlet and Swing, you can create app servers that can integrate all kinds of remote and local information resources, and client apps that allow you to remotely or locally access this information from the app server.In the future, with publicly available DTDs that are standardized for each vertical industry, XML based app servers will become very popular. Also when XML schema repositories become available and widely used, app servers will be able to take on a new role and provide application services that are not offered now. Companies will need to share information with other companies in related fields, and each company might have a different software system in which all their data is housed. By agreeing upon a set of DTDs or schemas (encoded in XML), these companies can exchange information with each other regardless of what systems they are using to store this information. If their app servers can exchange XML documents (based on some shared DTD or schema), then these disparate app servers can understand each other and share information. One of the uses for XML foreseen by the W3C is just this, vertical industries (like insurance and health care) creating sets of DTDs and schemas that all companies in the industry agree upon. Then these companies' app servers can talk to each other using some popular protocol (like HTTP or CORBA/IIOP) to exchange information between each other. This has the potential to save a lot of time and money in the daily business operations of these companies.
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| 7.8. Summary |  | 8.2. Block-Level Elements |
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P {margin: 5px; background-color: silver;
border-style: solid; border-width: thick;}
This can be taken to fairly ridiculous extremes, such as setting 20-pixel borders as depicted in Figure 7-39:
P {margin: 5px; background-color: silver;
border-style: solid; border-width: 20px;}
With the text properties, you can affect the position of text in relation to the rest of the line, and do things like superscripting, underlining, and changing the capitalization. You can even simulate, to a limited degree, the use of the Tab key on a typewriter.
It's best to start with a discussion of how you can affect the horizontal positioning of text within a line. This is not the same as to do is affect the margin on one side of the element as shown inFigure 7-14, which leads us to the next topic.
Fortunately, there'sa way to assign a value to the there won't be a margin.
TIP
In practice, browsers come with pre-assigned styles for many elements, and margins are no exception. For example, in CSS-enabled browsers, the "blank line" above and below each paragraph element is generated using margins. Therefore, if you don't declare margins for the P element, the browser may apply some margins on its own -- which is to say that just because you don't declare margins for an element doesn't mean