Re: Fwd: [CSS21] body { padding: 8px; } HTML40 sample stylesheet

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> But does this mean that a specification needs to contain an appendix of
> obscure status, saying that <ul> elements have 40 pixels left indentation?

And as a matter of fact, it does so in a suboptimal way.  What it lists 
is what IE does, but if authors start assuming that that's how all 
browsers do it, author styling breaks.

(The question is whether the indent should be done via padding or 
margin, basically -- some browsers use padding, some use margin).

This is the biggest danger of the default stylesheet in the spec -- that 
page authors start to assume that all browsers use it and then are 
unpleasantly surprised when it turns out that some browsers have what 
they think are better default stylesheets.  Not because the default 
rendering looks different, since browser makers are pretty careful to 
make sure that vanilla HTML renders similarly.  But because authors need 
to be more specific than they think when specifying styles (eg, 
resetting the margin of a <ul> will change its rendering in different 
ways depending on whether it has a default margin or default padding).

-Boris

Received on Friday, 25 July 2003 19:03:13 UTC