Re: How is it possible to devise such a feeble system?

> If whole1 has 100% width and 100% height, then you want to center
> horizontally and vertically the item(s) in whole1.  You should be able
> to do this with the styles above.  Of course, it doesn't work.  The
> text-align seems to work, but the vertical-align is still top aligned.

vertical-align controls the alignment of things *within a line* - so you'd
need to make sure the single line inside was the height of the entire
container for it to work (and even then, if you follow the spec, it would be
a bit too high by half the parent's x-height (from memory) --- but few seem
to do that).

> And another question... why does text-align use "center" to mean the
> center, and vertical-align uses "middle" to mean the center.  Could it

Middle doesn't mean center - go check out the spec in CSS-2. I think for
'center' you mean something like the 'absmiddle' of HTML.

    N.