Comments on: CSS Negotiation and a Sanity Saving Shortcut

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 01 May 2005 03:55:43 +0000

Yes, the star is the ‘universal selector’ — it’s a wildcard which selects all elements

By: fambizzari

fambizzari — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 00:46:52 +0000

* { padding:0; margin:0; }

Should the star be included as well?

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 15:00:52 +0000

One more big thanks for the padding: 0 margin: 0 suggestion. I have spent countless hours trying to get elements to align correctly across the major browsers — which is akin to hearding a bunch of cats. This simple trick will make life so much easier!

As far as browser support goes — I know two estremely wealthy people who use ancient hardware and never bother to upgrade their browsers. They are too busy making money to bother with upgrading anything, but they have the cash to buy almost anything and they do shop online. They may be only one in a million, but do you want to turn away a deep pocket customer like that?

By: Roland H.

Roland H. — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 20:30:53 +0000

Conditional comments can in fact be used to detect any specific version of MSIE. This technique, I believe, can be used to replace the more ugly CSS hack you suggest for differentiating between MSIE 5 and MSIE 5.5:
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/cc2.shtml

By: Brian Davidson

Brian Davidson — Sat, 05 Mar 2005 19:25:29 +0000

I suppose in this age of hack usage to try to serve different css to dodgy (and in some cases, not-so dodgy) browsers, it may seem almost blasphemous to say this, but I don’t use hacks.
Of any kind.
At all.

I (accidently) prevent NN4 from using my CSS by linking to the CSS file with a comma-separated media list but that is not really a hack, just CSS-compliant, and reduces the number of lines in my HTML file.

As a result I don’t need to worry about which hack goes with which browser, or inventing new hacks as other, more-compliant, browsers become available. Also, if you have NN4 or IE5.0 hacks, will you remove them as these browsers become less popular? At what level will you do so? When their usage drops below 10%? 5%? Or will your site always have the box model hack because there might just be one user in 10 million still using this browser in 2015?

I let the web be the web. I design according to recommendations in the knowledge that a compliant browser won’t break my site (and this browser is coming. Soon. Maybe…)

By: ben scott

ben scott — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:22:22 +0000

Think it is good when writing about a catch all css article to mention something about fonts set up.

From what I heard from someone else a good trick is to set the font size to 100% and then make sure all other font sizes dont go under 0.7 ems. As long as inheritance problems aren’t coming from a conatiner DIV tag giving 0.7ems and the 0.7ems of that for the P tage you shouldn’t ever get any problems.

also it might be nice to set a page default font in the body tag.