FW: A whole host of pseudo-elements

Forwarding this on behalf of Matthew Brealey

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Brealey [mailto:thelawnet@yahoo.com]
Sent: 03 November 1999 13:33
To: benjaminh@epic.co.uk
Subject: RE: A whole host of pseudo-elements


--- Benjamin Hardcastle <benjaminh@epic.co.uk> wrote:
> > E.g., H1 {text-transform: uppercase; font-size:
> 150%;
> > color: blue}
> >
> > H1:first-letters {color: red; font-size: 170%}
> >
> You could do, though I've found that enclosing the
> first letter in a <span> and
> applying a style to that works well, I've managed to
> get drop-caps without only
> a small amount of fiddling.

Having to enclose the first letter of every word in a
SPAN is not really in keeping with the CSS notions of
separating formatting from content, though I too find
that SPAN is the best way to get dropcaps to work
(mainly since you usually only want one letter in a
document) but chiefly because IE 3 applies
ELEMENT:unknownpseudo (everyhing except :active,
:link, :visited) to the whole element, so
P:first-letter {font-size: 48pt; float: left] will
cause _big_ problems. Equally using H1 +
P:first-letter works in very few UAs, so it is not
practical.

> > Which leads me on to the example of where we want
> > capital letters (as opposed to first letters of
> words)
> > to be in a different style.
> >
>
> These kinds of things have been mentioned before,
> and they have one downside in
> that they are generally specific to Latin scripts.

That didn't stop text-transform, and since UAs must by
t-t 'know' uppercase from lowercase glyphs, it seems a
small step to implement this.

PS. Greek has capitals too, although they are not used
in the same way as Latin ones (they were the original
letters from which lower case letters evolved as a
quicker way of writing).

=====
----------------------------------------------------------
>From Matthew Brealey (http://members.tripod.co.uk/lawnet (for law)or
http://members.tripod.co.uk/lawnet/WEBFRAME.HTM (for CSS))
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Received on Wednesday, 3 November 1999 09:11:26 UTC