On CSS and other machinations.

Dear fellow Monks,
As most of us know CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are a great boon to any web site developer and can make 'themed' sites very easy to create and maintain. PM supports this by having either on-site markup or allowing a link to an external css file under your user settings. "All well and good", or so I thought. After much playing around two major things have come to light:

CSS doesn't support underscores in the name (apparently?), for example:
When I submitted the following snippet at (http://jigsaw.w3.org)
```
tr.nodelet_head {
       font-weight : bold;
             color : #ff9933;
  background-color : #990000;
}
[download]
```
It produced the following error:
```
Errors
*    Line: 5 Context : tr.nodelet 
Parse Error - nodelet_head { font-weight : bold; color : #ff9933; back
+ground-color : #990000; }
[download]
```
So that's one thing to bear in mind as the PM stylesheet (available by 'viewing source') contains quite a few elements named with an underscore. Whilst most browsers couldn't give a fig and either work or not, Mozzila routinely ignores any named elements with an underscore in the name causing unexpected results.
After experementing I also found that not the whole PM site has been prepared for CSS, theres still quite a lot of hard coded areas where HTML elements have had their bgcolor set to blue/white as an example. And not to mention having gifs that haven't been given the transparency treatment. ;^)

So you're probably thinking "What a pedant"... or worse, at this point, well, I am and was wondering wether anyone else had come across the same problems? Do you reckon the Gods will hear this distant plea and come to my/our aid?

Thank you for listening to my rant.
Dave

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Re: On CSS and other machinations. by sch (Pilgrim) on Oct 20, 2002 at 19:39 UTC
Is there an introduction to CSS with PM anywhere? Obviously there's external stuff but I was wondering if anyone had written anything with a point to how PM could be themed and how the various CSS statements work? But today you took me walking, Through a land that we have lost, While our children sit at websites, With no access to the cost	[reply]
Re^2: On CSS and other machinations. by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Oct 20, 2002 at 20:02 UTC
There is no tutorial - since it'd be the same as a generic CSS tutorial. But there is a PM user style sheet repository - take a look at my what I use for example. `:-)` Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]
Re: On CSS and other machinations. by sch (Pilgrim) on Oct 22, 2002 at 05:11 UTC
There may not be anything in PM, but someone pointed out W3 Schools to me in the CB and I wanted to recommend it :) But today you took me walking, Through a land that we have lost, While our children sit at websites, With no access to the cost	[reply]
Re: On CSS and other machinations. by Mission (Hermit) on Oct 21, 2002 at 13:40 UTC
barrd, For some reason, Netscape (or Mozilla) doesn't allow for underscores in names of CSS or 'div' or any DHTML 'id' or 'name' attribute after their version 6 browser for Netscape and any Mozilla (that I'm aware of.) I've contacted them about this, and have had no luck in the getting them to admit it was a mistake, or something intentional for that matter. The only solution that I have (in order to make the CSS compatible with all browsers) is to avoid the underscore when naming CSS, or DHTML items. As soon as I read your opening statements, I knew where your post was heading. "Why did that happen?" In this case it's the choice of a browser developer. It has nothing to do with Perl, though I wish it was! For resources on CSS, you can visit some of the following web sites: ZVON MeyerWeb W3Schools OR A List Apart All are valued resources. *- Mission*	[reply]
Re^2: On CSS and other machinations. by adrianh (Chancellor) on Oct 21, 2002 at 21:31 UTC
For some reason, Netscape (or Mozilla) doesn't allow for underscores in names of CSS or 'div' or any DHTML 'id' or 'name' attribute after their version 6 browser for Netscape and any Mozilla (that I'm aware of.) ~~The reason Netscape & Mozilla don't allow "_" is that it's not legal CSS. See the appropriate dull bit from the spec.~~ ~~Not a bug :-)~~ I lied. Underscores have been allowed since the 1998 errata.	[reply]
Re: On CSS and other machinations. by joe++ (Friar) on Oct 21, 2002 at 15:58 UTC
Hi barrd, Regarding your css example, I did a quick test with two recent builds of Mozilla (Build 2002091208/WinNT, 2002100104/Linux). A <div class="test_underscore"> was perfectly stylable through css. Looking some more at the Perlmonks code, I noticed that both th.nodelet_head and tr.nodelet_head are used. Specifying a generic class ".nodelet_head" doesn't work, as it is less specific than the original style specificatuions. Playing with Mozilla's DOM inspector is very helpful to debug CSS issues like this. My solution is simple (for Mozilla at least): add the "!important" qualifier to your styles, this will override more specific but "unimportant" styles. `.nodelet_head { font-weight: bold !important; color: #ff9933 !important; background-color: #990000 !important; }` [download] This Works For Me^TM. On a side note, there is no mention of "css" connected with "underscore" to be found in Bugzilla - so I don't think this is a bug, at least not with current builds. Update: Fixed a typo ;-( Update 2: Apparently, from the CSS level 2 syntax specification I seem to conclude that the underscore in style identifiers indeed is illegal. Still, this works just fine for IE 5.x+ and Netscape 6+ (Mozilla) in production code on the site I'm maintaining as well. Hmm, maybe I should fix that one day... -- Cheers, Joe	[reply] [d/l]
Re: (nrd) On CSS and other machinations. by newrisedesigns (Curate) on Oct 21, 2002 at 14:06 UTC
You could aid the gods if you wouldn't mind fixing the errors/letting them know where they are. This isn't a really big issue, so just ask nicely and I'm sure they'll help. John J Reiser newrisedesigns.com	[reply]
Re: On CSS and other machinations. by barrd (Canon) on Oct 21, 2002 at 17:19 UTC
Thanks people for all the replies, I've gotten hold of some new ideas and links to play with. The main thing was (thanks to Mission) I realised that I wasn't going nuts... I'm going to read through it all and try and find a better way to do it. Update » thanks Joe++, I'd kinda come to the same conclusions, so I won't be using underscores in any of my naming conventions here-on-in, that should make things a tad easier for the future. And again, thanks for your reply.	[reply]