[thelist] CSS preview in Dreamweaver

Thu Feb 28 15:33:18 CST 2002

> it seems my styles aren't inherited in the design view of Dreamweaver.
> i.e.
> my body text is set at .8em, which, it seems should follow that my table
> would inherit this property, but no i have to reapply font-size to
> <tds>.
> what up? anyone else had this problem?

1. A WYSIWYG editor's design view window isn't the place to check your
code. Load the page up in a browser to see how it performs, as that's
the place where the page will be working in the real world. I can't
comment on the current version of Dreamweaver as I haven't used it, but
GoLive 5 munges CSS layouts totally in it's preview window, as do most
of the other WYSIWYG editors I've seen.

2. Style inheritance is a bit shaky in pre-v6 browsers, and it's often
best to define such things manually to ensure cross browser
compatibility. For example:

body,div,td,p,li,dl,dt,dd, {font-family:verdana,arial,sans-serif;}

3. Be careful about setting font sizes using em in the example above. In
browsers where inheritance odes work correctly, a <p> inside a <td>
inside a <body>, all defined with 0.8em font size, will end up at 0.8 x
0.8 x 0.8. If your <body> text is at the equivalent of 12px, the inner
<p> will be at 7.7px--a bit small.

Regards
Mark Howells
<http://www.mark.ac/>