FONT vs CSS

Greetings,

Chris Wilson and myself exchanged a few emails on the www-style list (a
while ago) regarding Font vs CSS.  It appears that FONT information (and
other presentational elements) will interact with CSS and can even have a
greater weight, such as in this example:

<STYLE>
P {color:blue}
EM {color:green}
</STYLE>
...
<P>This is a paragraph <EM><FONT color="red">with emphasised
text</FONT></EM>.</P>
...

In this example the FONT has greater weight and so 'wins'.  Swap the EM and
FONT and the EM will have the greater weight. (This is under IE4 on Win95 -
there was a 'bug' in IE3 such that the CSS would always win).  But what
about "! important".  Wouldn't having that on the EM style decl for colour
override FONT?  It doesn't.

I think it is rather silly that FONT et al would have any play in CSS styled
HTML on a CSS browser but then I guess it is impossible to turn off FONT et
al rendering as you don't really know what the author intended.  HOWEVER, I
thought 

FONT {text-decoration:none}

could be used to prevent FONT having any play at all.  But this doesn't
work.  NONE doesn't switch off font rendering (but 'underline' will
underline the font text).  So what is the purpose of 'NONE'?  I checked the
mastergrid of which browser on which platform supports what
(http://www.webreview.com/guides/style/mastergrid.html) and NONE is indeed
supported on Windows IE4.  Looking at an article by Eric Meyer
(http://webreview.com/wr/pub/98/07/10/style/index.html) it says the 'NONE'
is the default.  Thus text-decoration just does modification (relative) and
is not for absolute values (where NONE would mean 'turn everything off').
Perhaps then, what I really want is a way to decrease the weight - a '!
NOTimportant'.  Is there a means to do this?

Lastly, is there a way of searching the archives?  I went in there thinking
there would be but it seems that in order to find past posts about
'text-decoration' I'd have to go through every message and do a free-text
search.  (At http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/ )

Hope that is clear and someone can reply on the issues raised,

Thanks,

Brooke
=======================================
http://www.butterworths.com.au/profile/people/brooke/
+61 412 024 742                              +61 2 9422 2223
       Butterworths Electronic Publishing Developer

Received on Tuesday, 8 September 1998 20:54:04 UTC