CSS Snippets

for practical use of CSS

this document is located at...
<URI:http://css.nu/pointers/snippets.html>

Snippets Menu

Bits and pieces from hither and yon. Suggestions are welcome, as are complaints. Each will get the attention it deserves.

Bits & Pieces

Downlevel browsers: Authors may wish to design their HTML documents to be viewable on older browsers that don't recognise the STYLE element. Unfortunately any style statements placed within a STYLE element will be visible to users. Some style sheet languages such as CSS allow the style statements to be enclosed in an SGML comment, for instance:

<STYLE TYPE="text/css">

</STYLE>

Note that for user agents conforming to this specification, the comment is interpreted by the application and not the SGML parser.

Highlight bits of text with a simple declaration.

Return to the Top

It has been pointed out in news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets that Adobe Type Manager, used in conjunction with Internet Explorer 4x can cause unexpected rendering of italicized fonts. When ATM was disabled, the rendering was normalized. Update Adobe responded to the bug report with the following 'solutions':

In the Advanced Settings tab of the ATM control panel, deselect the 'Enable Font Substitution' button.
In IE4, go to View | Internet Options | Accessability and select 'Ignore Font Styles' button.

Restart IE4 and go to the problematic website and the problem should be solved.
We expect to hear from Microsoft before the end of the millenium, so stay tuned for further developments.

Return to the Top

FAQs

My Styles don't work

Not all/some versions of each/all browser(s) support CSS.
Check your CSS with CSSCheck from Liam Quinn of the Web Design Group.
Make sure that you don't have any HTML markup in your style sheet.
Check the mastergrid to see if support for your declaration is buggy or partial
If using Netscape, make sure you have enabled Javascript, as well as style sheets.
Okay, I've done all of the above, and my styles _still_ don't work. What now?
Ask specific questions in the Style sheets newsgroup. Include an URL or snippet of markup for best results.

What DOCTYPE should I use?

Two suggestions at the W3C Validation Service are:

Transitional: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
Strict: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">

How to prevent hypertext underlines.

My document doesn't look the same in IE 4x and NN 4x. Why?

Why? See Eric Meyer's grid. Browser versions have not supported some/all/any CSS elements equally/correctly.

Is everyone on this newsgroup still crying?

No. We've begun wailing and gnashing.

How do I set font and color for a select field in a form?

With a declaration like: SELECT { width: 10em; color: blue; background: white }

Note: This is not supported in all browsers, modulo CSS caveats.

Why won't (font-color)(font-family) affect my table?

You'll need to assign font-color to individual rows or cells, instead of the entire table. You also need to explicitly close <TH>, <TR> and <TD>, to 'work around' a Netscape 'feature'.

Return to the Top

Color Considerations

The 140 'Color names' are listed in this file.: After finding and arranging them, I finally found something useful to do with them. The CSS file used in these tests is 'stickynote.css'.; Note: There are really 140 names, but only 138 colours. 'Fuchsia' and 'Magenta' both map to #FF00FF, and cyan and aqua both map to #00FFFF.; ^[new !] While suffering through an unusually bad bout of ennui, I found that the marriage of CSS with ASCII art provided another generation of CSS notagifs (tm). It turned out that such experimentation could relieve some of the symptoms, but the true diagnosis was lovesickness. The prognosis, however, is optomistic.
Some Color Tests are provided for consideration.