[thelist] CSS and grids

john at johnallsopp.co.uk john at johnallsopp.co.uk
Wed Dec 28 12:00:27 CST 2005


Hi

I'm no great graphic designer, but I am a bit more than an interested
amateur and from what I understand a printed page has a grid that is
built up from building blocks of a fixed size, determined by the
smallest font.

So, for instance, if it turns out that your footer font has a
linespace (bottom of one font to the same point on the line above) of
5px then everything else horizontally must be positioned on multiples
of 5px.

The result, I hope, is a balanced, rhythmic page, one that just seems
right.

It appears, after having spent a good amount of time working on this,
that Firefox on Linux does this differently to IE on XP, so I decided
to get IE on XP to work.

Take a look at this <http://www.johnallsopp.co.uk/sli/index.php4>
using IE on XP.

Each part is fine on its own (the background shows a 5px grid), but in
the crossover from h1 to h2, and from h2 to p, it loses the rhythm. I
imagine there's some funky calculation that goes on but I actually
don't know.

I could presumably say that any h2 that follows a h1 should be
positioned relatively up two pixels (or something like that) but that
seems a bit of a mess.

Can you think of anything that would help me out? The css is here
<http://www.studiolegaleinternazionale.com/chargeableContent/sli.css>.

I'm aware of the possibility that IE6 might lose the plot when images
are inserted, but I'm trying to get the fundamentals right for now.

J





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