Re: Line spacing not working

On Tue, 10 Nov 2009, David Stone wrote:

I am somewhat surprised to find that MS has not upgraded Courier

MS Windows has Courier New.

How often do you actually use Courier, and what do you use if for?
On my sites, it's only ever used for code snippets which are more
likely to be copy/pasted; neither are they likely to be presented
in italics, so it seems likely that windows bitmap Courier would
not degrade as much?

This problem was reported for upright, non-italic Courier in
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/de.comm.software.mozilla.browser/browse_thread/thread/c6890beff0a4936f
<news:wz6i69q67oyb$.1b8zfxdk1ti4n.dlg (AT) 40tude (DOT) net>

--
In memoriam Alan J. Flavell
http://www.alanflavell.org.uk/charset/

In article <lPiKm.38039$La7.33274 (AT) uutiset (DOT) elisa.fi>,
"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

dorayme wrote:

So what do you make of FF showing a line-height of a mere 1 times
font size when "Browser Default Style' is turned off?

....

Using Firefox with Web Developer Extension (that's what you mean, right?),
on can switch off style sheets individually. One of them is called "browser
style sheet", and it's fair to expect it to correspond to the CSS concept of
browser's default style sheet. Our expectations might be wrong, but they are
justified.

What happens on Firefox when I switch off all style sheets, including
"browser style sheet", that way is that line height indeed becomes awfully
small. It's apparently 1 or rather close. Now does this mean that normal
means 1 to Firefox? Hardly.

I guess not if we think of FF as what it ships and operates with

normally but sans author styles. What it operates with in terms of style
sheets or other linked documents is not exactly transparent: I was
poking about in the package it comes in and saw various things (like
html.css) which it may use under some conditions but my foolish
experiments were unreliable for reasons possibly unrelated to their
foolishness.

When I look at the rendering of a completely unstyled document, I still see
line breaks (though no vertical spacing) around headings and paragraphs,
heading elements bolded, links with underline etc. There is nothing in the
initial values that explains this. For example, the initial value for
display is inline for all elements.

So what I see really something that the browser does outside the scope of
CSS, logically speaking at least.

(It may well have some hidden styles
anyway.) If you switch off all style sheets for an HTML document, you're
effectively switching off CSS for it, i.e. whatever you see does not say
anything about CSS implementation, in principle at least.

It is at least *as if* the browser has a default default sheet that
reduces all elements to font-size: normal and line-height of 1, a
privileged sheet that does not get turned off by pressing the Browser
Default Styles under the CSS/Disable Style menu in the web developer
extension we are talking about. Pressing Disable All Styles makes no
difference if there are no author styles, so it seems disabling author
styles is its main (and very useful) function. It is simply a bit
obscure what it is doing when it claims to Disable Browser Default
Styles.

Moreover, I don't rely on this feature of Web Developer Extension. It does
not work reliably. Switching off "browser style sheet" apparently switches
off other things as well (e.g., heading font size settings vanish, even
though I make them in my own stylesheet, which I do not switch off).

I agree.

--
dorayme

On Nov 2, 11:15*pm, Ben C <spams... (AT) spam (DOT) eggs> wrote:

Or is he just interested in the words "strict", "transitional",
"loose", "frameset", "xhtml" and "html"?

Most browsers just do a bit of pattern matching on that to decide
whether to use quirks mode or not.

[...]
The DTD doesn't contain initial values (or default styles). It's
something else altogether-- tells you what kind of tags you can use and
how you can nest them and other stuff Korpela will know more about.

But browsers don't really use them for anything in practice except
quirks mode switching.

Ok - thanks Ben!

In article <lPiKm.38039$La7.33274 (AT) uutiset (DOT) elisa.fi>,
"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

dorayme wrote:

So what do you make of FF showing a line-height of a mere 1 times
font size when "Browser Default Style' is turned off?

I have since asked the web developer extension maker, Chris Pederick
about this menu item. As I understand from his replies, it is a trigger
to implement a reset style sheet of his, a sheet a bit similar to the
one at

<http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/>

The idea being, as I understand it, to alert the author to provide for
the styles that are being reset, the goal, I think, being to gain
greater consistency across browsers. The actual sheet he uses and the
exchange between us should be able to be seen by anyone at:

<http://chrispederick.com/forums/>

And look under General.

I am reminded of the those of us who set their browser default
backgrounds in Options or Preferences to some ghastly colour to remind
themselves to set background colours. It is a general ploy to alert the
author.

--
dorayme

dorayme wrote:

So what do you make of FF showing a line-height of a mere 1 times
font size when "Browser Default Style' is turned off?

I have since asked the web developer extension maker, Chris Pederick
about this menu item. As I understand from his replies, it is a
trigger to implement a reset style sheet of his, a sheet a bit
similar to the one at

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

That surely explains why line-height appears to be 1. :-)

As a whole, the menu item has nothing to do with switching off browser style
sheet. Instead, it adds a particular style sheet, presumably reflecting
someone's idea of "neutral" (I'd say "dull") style.

The idea being, as I understand it, to alert the author to provide for
the styles that are being reset,

This whole "reset" idea is odd. Why do they call it "reset" when they add a
style sheet that sets some properties for some elements to initial values
and some other to values they just made up, like line-height: 1? What's the
point of preventing browsers from rendering <ins> the way modern browsers do
and explicitly urge them to use their default for <del>?

the goal, I think, being to gain
greater consistency across browsers.

I don't see a goal, just some play with CSS.

The actual sheet he uses and the
exchange between us should be able to be seen by anyone at:

http://chrispederick.com/forums/

And look under General.

Ummm... I'm not _that_ interested in the specifics that would dive into a
discussion forum.

A real "reset" style sheet would set all properties for all elements to
their initial values, to the extent they have been defined in CSS specs.
Then you would have to do all the styling from more or less scratch, in the
hope of creating browser-independent rendering. It wouldn't be a complete
success though, because not all aspects of rendering are describable in CSS
as currently defined and because of CSS Caveats.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

In article <dOvLm.39895$La7.36616 (AT) uutiset (DOT) elisa.fi>,
"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

dorayme wrote:

So what do you make of FF showing a line-height of a mere 1 times
font size when "Browser Default Style' is turned off?

I have since asked the web developer extension maker, Chris Pederick
about this menu item. As I understand from his replies, it is a
trigger to implement a reset style sheet of his, a sheet a bit
similar to the one at

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

That surely explains why line-height appears to be 1. :-)

Well, what specifically explains it is it that Pederick *does* use
line-height: 1 in:

body, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, li, ol, p, ul
{
font-size: 1em;
line-height: 1.0;
}

The actual reset sheet he uses I did not quote to save space here but it
can be seen in the other URL I gave.

As a whole, the menu item has nothing to do with switching off browser style
sheet. Instead, it adds a particular style sheet, presumably reflecting
someone's idea of "neutral" (I'd say "dull") style.

Yes, OK but "switching off" is just an expression. It is not meant to be
nice, it is meant to alert the author to provide for certain styles so
that the different browsers do not insert their own and rather different
or slightly different ones. At least that is how I read the matter. Yes,
he seems to be just selecting some things he thinks particularly
important.

The idea being, as I understand it, to alert the author to provide for
the styles that are being reset,

This whole "reset" idea is odd. Why do they call it "reset" when they add a
style sheet that sets some properties for some elements to initial values
and some other to values they just made up, like line-height: 1? What's the
point of preventing browsers from rendering <ins> the way modern browsers do
and explicitly urge them to use their default for <del>?

Well, as I said above. On the analogy, as I understand it, of the
usefulness of setting browser background preferences/options to
something that tends to make one sick... as a reminder to set
backgrounds for key elements especially when setting color. I am not
arguing with anyone on this, I am just discussing this.

Harlan, please stand by with that analogy notebook you keep in case no
one understands my analogy. (If necessary do not flinch to put your own
name down if you don't! <g>)

So, what happens is this. An author makes a CSS sheet, conscientiously
he puts in whatever he feels helps browser consistency. Let's leave out
the specifics for now. He then turns on this Web Developer 'Disable
Browser Styles' menu to see if he has left anything that he might not
want to leave out. The Disable Browser Styles does not turn off author
styles.

the goal, I think, being to gain
greater consistency across browsers.

I don't see a goal, just some play with CSS.

Well, I see a goal and it does not appear unintelligent to me. That does
not mean I would rush to embrace it (truth is, I don't really care if my
web pages look a bit different in different browsers, the differences
never seem important enough to me. But that is just me maybe. I am fussy
about a few things, but perhaps differ from others in what to worry
about. Perhaps we are all a bit like this? But there do seem to be
rather a lot of people who *do worry* about browser inconsistencies
(and, to echo a point Harlan made in a thread about yahoo reset, I don't
mean the bugs and straight out incorrect rendering of some browsers)

The actual sheet he uses and the
exchange between us should be able to be seen by anyone at:

http://chrispederick.com/forums/

And look under General.

Ummm... I'm not _that_ interested in the specifics that would dive into a
discussion forum.

There is nothing to dive into. I asked a question, he answered simply

and I thanked him, that was almost all there was to it. Plus, you can
see the actual sheet he uses.

A real "reset" style sheet would set all properties for all elements to
their initial values, to the extent they have been defined in CSS specs.
Then you would have to do all the styling from more or less scratch, in the
hope of creating browser-independent rendering. It wouldn't be a complete
success though, because not all aspects of rendering are describable in CSS
as currently defined and because of CSS Caveats.

Well, there is doing something good enough and doing it to perfection. A
watch, for example, is a better watch for not varying randomly by a
minute a day. But is hardly any better for most of us for varying
randomly by a second a day (rather than not at all).

--
dorayme