Re: indents

Todd,

>Wait a minute - I thought CSS was supposed to deliver us from temptation to
>use markup as "a catch-all dustbin" for purely presentational effects. If
>

IMHO I think of initial paragraphs as having a structural meaning. They
introduce a concept to be elaborated on in following paragraphs. The
presentational effect is to alert the reader to an important paragraph. But
I will concede the case is weaker than for other classes.

I think of <p class=note> <p class=copyright> <p class=warning> <p
class=caution> <p class=notice> <p class=biblio> <p class=annot> as all
having a meaning related to content. (Freely offered for inclusion in a
standard set of class names). In modern books the presentation mostly
follows the content structure, so it's logical for CSS to hang presentation
on structural elements. For some nineteenth-century texts I've done, there
are styles not associated with an element---purely for effect or for some
subtle emphasis we don't 'hear' today.

>First, you should not have to re-author content like this to achieve a
>reasonably sophisticated presentation with CSS - as a reader with a
>personal stylesheet, this is not an option. Second, the search would have

Yep. That is what I've been thinking about lately as I need more and more
subclasses to express *content.* Yet the more subclasses I use the less
likely a reader will be able to apply a stylesheet of their own with the
expected result.

>I've been playing with varying outdents, case transformations, and
>letter-spacing, in addition to varying leading and trailing space. IE4's
>CSS implementation seems to be better than 95% there, the "em" thing being
>a notable exception.
>

That's good news. I'd like to stop using this kind of l e t t e r  s p a c
i n g! Looks terrible in non-css browsers in a heading. From reading the
newsgroup, I gathered that CSS was degraded from IE3.02 and did not want to
lose what I had by installing. I did play with NN4.0 PR3; I successfully
used positioning properties in my style sheet to create columns, one for
outline and one for text. It was quite effective and interesting to see
plain HTML2.0 lined up in two columns. Only my internal links would not
work afterward. I used negative indention on the headings. The page margins
had to be changed for the columns. When I viewed the page in Explorer 3.02,
the headings were partly off the left side of the page. It might work if I
left margins on body and use absolute positioning for the columns. 

Steve

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   _/ Steve Knoblock
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   _/ Member NSA http://www.3d-web.com/nsa/sw.html

Received on Friday, 11 April 1997 02:06:40 UTC