Re: div#header vs. #header

William Gill :

If I use the selector #header, it will match any any element that is
identified as "header".

Quite, but there should be at most one in your document, so the "any" part
is a bit misleading. It is like saying, e.g., "Any URL which is identical
to http://www.w3c.org/ points to the web site of the World Wide Web
Consortium".

--
Johannes
"Quand on dit c'est un Johannes, cela vaut autant que ce que maintenant
on appelle un pédant" (H. Estienne, in É. Littré, /Dictionnaire de la
langue française/, art. PÉDANT)

William Gill :

Is this any clearer?

"If I use the selector #header, it will match an element of any type
that has been identified as "header", if one exists."

Much clearer :-)

I was wondering if you were somehow trying to distinguish between
different types of elements with the same id attribute in the same
document. That would have been silly, of course, but I have seen worse
questions asked.

Anyway, as I understand the specs, div#x is more specific than #x, so it
wins in the rather unlikely case one would bother to write both.

Specifically :-), "#x" would have a specificity of a=0 b=1 c=0 d=0 ->
0,1,0,0 while "div#x" would have a specificity of a=0 b=1 c=0 d=1 ->
0,1,0,1 (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/cascade.html#specificity)


--
Johannes
"Quand on dit c'est un Johannes, cela vaut autant que ce que maintenant
on appelle un pédant" (H. Estienne, in É. Littré, /Dictionnaire de la
langue française/, art. PÉDANT)

William Gill wrote:

Jonathan N. Little wrote:

I personally would use #withid and would only preface with the element
type if the rule contained a property that related specifically to
that element. e.g.,

ul#withid { list-style: none; }
#withid { color: red; background-color: white; }

Thank you Jonathan, and what I was trying to make figure out was, if I
willingly sacrifice that flexibility in order to give myself a crutch
(i.e. a reminder of the element the style was being applied to), what
other unintended consequence might I create.

Well I would say as a "crutch" use a comment! I believe in comments, a
create tool from programming background. Even if you will be the only
one maintaining code of any sort, a comment can save countless hours of
head-scratching when your need to fix or update many months|years down
the road.

/* outer DIV for formating the main page content */
#wrapper {...

--
Take care,

Jonathan
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