Comments on: Styling figures with CSS3

By: Jonny Axelsson

Jonny Axelsson — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:49:23 +0000

Robin wrote: “Your first-line and first-letter commands are pseudoelements so should be denoted by the ‘::’ syntax, not ‘:’ (which is used for pseudoclasses).”

In (Postel) principle I would disagree with you, “Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.” CSS2 had a very limited number of pseudo-classes and pseudo-element, while CSS3 has a great many. Syntactically it makes sense to separate between the two, but a CSS2 agent didn’t need to. By being “liberal in what you send” you would needlessly exclude CSS2 user agents that would otherwise be capable of handling those pseudo-elements.

In practice it doesn’t matter. There aren’t that many original CSS2 agents, of these very few supported these pseudo-elements and those that did made this switch early on. I know Opera did almost immediately after it was established (I forget when, Opera 6?) and to my knowledge so did the rest. The converse, discontinuing “:before”, “:after”, “:first-line”, and “:first-element” in browsers, should not happen until CSS2 is obsolete, and that is unlikely to happen before at least a decade from now.

By: David Storey

David Storey — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:22:02 +0000

Michael: That is just the margin I set so that there was a space of one line (pluss line height) below the image. Changing the bottom margin on the figure div to -35px would do the trick to remove that gap.

By: Michael C. Rael

Michael C. Rael — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 20:22:16 +0000

There’s a space below the photo that seems to be about the same height as the height of the caption box. Any way to reduce that height?

By: Robin

Robin — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:11:13 +0000

Your first-line and first-letter commands are pseudoelements so should be denoted by the ‘::’ syntax, not ‘:’ (which is used for pseudoclasses).

Nitpicking aside, nice article!

By: David Storey

David Storey — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 10:40:00 +0000

John: Well, we have a department (or in truth a sub department) called Open the Web, which contains Web Openers. I’m the team leader, and as such the Chief Web Opener. Opera has a problem where a number of sites do not work in our browser, not because Opera isn’t standards complient or has a bug, but because a site sends Opera broken content in some way. This could be that it sniffs the user agent and gives us broken code or blocks us entirely (just try going to docs.google.com ;)) or that the developer has only tested in IE or Firefox and accidentally takes advantage of a bug or vendor specific extension of those browsers. It is quite common thinking that if you test in Firefox it means your code will work in standards based browsers and is standards compliant. This is not always the case however as all browsers have bugs. So it is my team’s task to open the web by getting these sites to both work in our browser and other standards based browsers. Fixing an issue that breaks Opera can often fix it for Firefox and Safari. We make sure that any suggest fixes we give to sites also work in the major browsers.

By: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 10:14:25 +0000

Welcome David! Nice post and glad to see you joining us :)

By: John Faulds

John Faulds — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 06:20:31 +0000

RGBA looks quite promising as I’ve always found transparency limited in its use due to it affecting both background and content.

And I wanted to ask after I first saw your signature on the WSG mailing list – what exactly does a Chief Web ‘Opener’ do? Not trying to be funny; I just think it’s an interesting choice of term.