Sometimes you have a piece of content that you want to display in a number of different web pages and you want it to look the same in all the pages regardless of how the rest of the page looks. In this article we look at how you can write the stylesheet commands for a given piece of content in such a way as to minimise the possibility that it will interfere with the rest of the page.
The one browser that has always insisted on doing things its own way rather than following the standards is Internet Explorer (this is perhaps because for a number of years IE6 was so popular that it effectively was the standard). Now that IE only has 50% of the market you need your web pages to work on standards compliant browsers as well as IE and so you need to also be aware of the quirks in how IE works. One of these quirks is hasLayout and in this article we look at how to code your stylesheet so that it works correctly in both standards compliant browsers and in IE.
Another of my early CSS articles and one that is extremely easy to apply to any web page are these styles for producing dropcaps (where the first letter is several lines high) and minicaps (where the text uses smaller uppercase letters instead of lowercase ones.
Back when I wrote this article it was still fairly common to pollute your HTML with deprecated attributes to define your page appearance such as the background attribute on the body tag. Even back then the better way to specify your page background was to use stylesheets since there are many things that can be done when you specify the background that way that are not possible without stylesheets.
I received several books for review this last week and since the books usually take so long to reach me, I usually try to review them as quickly as I can after I receive them.
This is the first of two books that I received together, both from New Riders. This particular book is filled with loads of practical information on setting up the appearance of your page using CSS.
I started writing pages about using stylesheets long before separating it out into its own section of my site. One of the first articles on stylesheets that I wrote was one on how you can effectively generate your own tags for whatever you want to include in the HTML by simply assigning a class to a span tag.
Back in the early days of stylesheets support for the various commands varied somewhat between browsers. Quite a number of browsers also had quirks where they misinterpreted stylesheet commands either ignoring an invalid character and processing a command that ought to be ignored or by not recognising a valid character and so not processing a command that they ought to. Of course then there are all of the stylesheet commands that early browsers didn’t support and which they therefor also ignore.
The biggest problems come with the commands that the browsers don’t ignore but which they don’t process correctly either. Clever hacks were found that made use of the quirks that given browsers had in order to get them to read or skip over commands that were needed to rectify the bugs in the other browsers.
Now that all current browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer process those stylesheet commands that they do understand properly the only current browser where hacks would still be needed is IE. The problem with using hacks for current browsers though is that the next version of the browser may not understand the same hacks or may not have the same problem in the first place.
Updating the background colours and images is the final step in converting a generic template into the custom template that you will use as the basis for all the pages on your web site. Exactly how you do these background changes depends on whether you have selected a template that does things properly using a stylesheet or have one that is not as well coded and uses badly coded HTML. In the sixth NVU tutorial I consider both types of template but concentrate mostly on the better written ones (which hopefully is the sort you chose).
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