[thelist] "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet!" ?

[Simon Willison]

Just wondering what the origin of this oh-so-common piece of text is.
I'm guessing it's Latin but what does it mean and why is it used so
often to bulk out designs that have not yet had proper text added to them?

Case in point: http://www.glish.com/css/blogger/blogger.html - but I've
seen it loads of times before.

<tip type="CSS Mouseovers">
This is my first experiment with CSS for anything other than basic
typography so it's probably not of tip standard, but I thought I'd share
it here anyway since I created it thanks to all the help I got from
thelist with my CSS questions the other day. Here's a cool way of making
one of those hover-your-mouse-over-a-link-and-
the-table-cell-changes-colour things without using tables. Te principle
is simple - you have a set of normal links inside a div with a specific
ID - then you create a stylesheet which selects all <a> tags inside that
id and sets them to be block level rather than inline and adds a
background colour. Do an additional style with a :hover modifier and
you're sorted - here's the code:

<style type="text/css">
#menu {
  width: 160px;
  font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;
  font-size: 80%;
  background-color: aliceblue;
}
#menu a {
  display: block;
  background-color: darkblue;
  color: aliceblue;
  text-align: center;
}
#menu a:hover {
  background-color: aliceblue;
  color: darkblue;
}
</style>

<div id="menu">
<a href="somewhere1.html">A link</a>
<a href="somewhere2.html">Another link</a>
<a href="somewhere3.html">And another</a>
</div>

</tip>