Correct way to define "leading" - compatibility problems

I'm a little confused (makes a change!), about leading, or what I suppose 
we should now call linefeed.

I seem to have two (at least) solutions for defining leading:

     { line-height: 1.5em }

or

     { font: 1em/1.5em }

Is one or other of these obsolete or never reached a recommendation 
stage? Both seem to give widely varying displays in browsers, from 
correct (or at least what I think should happen), to ignoring the 
setting, to collapsing all the lines between <p></p> tags onto one line!?

Just a couple of other points, "width" for text elements seems to be 
ignored by IE, as does "em" (when applied to text size) which it seems to 
regard as being 12pt, rather than a multiple of the default text size (as 
Navigator does).

Is there a minimal set of features that are currently supported 
cross-browser and cross-platform, that don't completely screw display on 
earlier versions of CSS savvy browsers (I'm thinking principally here of 
IE 3.x compared to 4.x implementation)?

Thanks


-- Clive

Received on Sunday, 22 February 1998 15:44:12 UTC