[thelist] CSS, Netscape, .class oddity?

[Erika Meyer]

>As to borders: I had terrible trouble with a 'border: none' declaration on
>a P (to get it to make a nice block of the bgcolor). NN4's crashed on my
>site constantly; when I removed the border it stopped.

I guess you these little bugs are here & there and you don't run into 
them until you run into them.  No reason to be afraid of styles 
though.

>In Netscape, no, it's not a good idea. IE doesn't care.

It's good form to close your tags.  If I understand correctly, HTML 
is coming to an end -- there will be no more future versions of HTML. 
The current recommendation is XHTML with the expectation of moving 
toward XML.  You can't not close tags in XHTML or XML.  This is 
another reason to start closing <P>'s and <LI>'s if you don't already.

>position: relative;
>margin-top: -20px;
>
>is supposed to be perfectly all-right, but

I think you're into CSS2 which I try to avoid because the bugs are so 
much buggier.  I don't see anything like this on the CSS1 spec.

>IE4 has a similar problem that's caused by quite different declarations in
>the style sheet (not yet sure which ones, but I had a 'height: 90%' that
>closed down all links). This, too, was caused by CSS1 that was valid and
>OK, but just didn't work correctly.

yes, and I used "text-indent: 5%" once, and the line of text ran off 
the end of the screen for miles & miles on some versions of IE... 
which one reason why I am careful with percentages...

A lot of this is balancing a need to be consistent & safe with a 
degree of risk-taking.  A lot of it is sacrificing absolute control 
over display.  Probably it is best, at first, to add CSS1 a little at 
the time, at the same time making sure your HTML is clean.

When it comes to CSS for positioning, I don't have much to say.  I'm 
waiting until I and the browsers get CSS1 right before I wade too far 
into those waters.

Erika

erika at seastorm.com
http://www.seastorm.com