Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

Tips & Tricks

Here we present a handful of quick tips and workarounds which might save you a lot of time and hassles. Some are related to ways of making buggy browsers behave, while others describe ways to write completely correct CSS and HTML and still mangle the document display, simply by not thinking about the consequences of one’s actions.

Making Styles Work

This is an easy one. If you want Navigator 4 to use CSS at all, you have to go to the preferences dialog and check the boxes for both style sheets and JavaScript. If JavaScript is disabled, Navigator will not apply styles. Why? In the early days of style sheets, there were a number of proposals for styling. One of these was JavaScript Style Sheets ( JSSS), an interesting hybrid of early CSS and JavaScript. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that JSSS was promoted by Netscape. Although JSSS was never adopted, Navigator 4’s rendering engine uses it, and so CSS doesn’t work without JavaScript.

Hiding Styles with @import

The fact that Navigator 4.x understands LINK but doesn’t recognize @import statements can be turned to your advantage. Since any styles you place in an external style sheet must be brought in via either LINK or @import, you can group all of the styles that will cause Navigator problems and put them into a style sheet that you then import. Since Navigator will refuse to import this style sheet, it won’t have to deal with styles it can’t deal with. This simple trick can save you a lot of headaches, but ...