[thelist] CSS, Netscape, .class oddity?

[Peter-Paul Koch]

>>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.

No, but a reason to keep paying attention. I also hoped to find a general
rule, like "if you declare a border AND the padding is in % Netscape
crashes" but no such luck.

>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.

I don't exactly believe in XHTML (though XML is something else again). See
my article at

http://www.alistapart.com/stories/xhtml/

for my arguments why XHTML is not (yet) important.

>>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.

Dunno if it's 1 or 2, but it works in NN4 and IE4 (except for the mentioned
NN4 bug).

>>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...

How wonderful... Was it IE4 on Mac, maybe? It has terrible trouble 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.

I agree completely. I do it the other way around, first do it as you like,
then see what breaks and mend it or remove the declarations, but in the end
it amounts to the same: margins and font for paragraphs, a little colour in
the headers, maybe some simple layers and that's basically it.

>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.

Absolute positioning generally works reasonably well. I do it every now and
then. Don't make it too complicated, however.

ppk

PS: Please cc me, I read the digest.