Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / CSS / November 2003

Or with inheritance of font properties in general?

Browsers often get them wrong; e.g., the principle that the _computed_ value
is what gets inherited is violated, in different ways, by IE 6 and Opera 7.

I hope Verdana is just a dummy example here. (If it isn't, you should check
what has been written about Verdana in this group.) Ditto for the use of the
pt unit.

W3C's "CSS Validator"
( http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-text.html )
gives odd results. When the Warnings option is set to "No warnings" it says:

Errors
URI : file://localhost/TextArea
Line: 0 Context : strong
Invalid number : fonttoo few values for the property normal 14pt : normal
14pt

Valid CSS information
p {
font : normal 10pt Verdana;
}

But when I set Warnings to "Normal report", I get:

Warnings
URI : file://localhost/TextArea
Line : 0 font-family: You are encouraged to offer a generic family as a last
alternative
Valid CSS information
p {
font : normal 10pt Verdana;
}
strong {
font : normal 14pt;
}

which seems to say that the style sheet is "valid" in its opinion (no error
message issued) but it echoes it back without the 'inherit' keyword (thereby
changing the meaning, in general)!

Confused? Well, so is the "validator", and so is the specification. See
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#font-shorthand
and consider the declaration
font: inherit 100% Arial;
Does 'inherit' set font-style, or font-variant, or font-weight? They are
allowed in any order, and they are all optional, so which one is it?

You case is different, since the 'inherit' value appears in a position where
it must mean a value for font-family. But the above notes show how confused
even the W3C is with 'inherit'.

But why would you set the font-family at all? In theory, the initial value
of this property "depends on user agent", but to be reasonable we must
expect that browsers have a default style sheet that sets properties like
font-family to 'inherit' to most elements, or act as if they did. Anyway, to
stay on the safe side, you could dispense with the font shorthand and
set directly

p, strong { font-family: Verdana; }
p { font-size: 10pt;
strong { font-size: 14pt;
        font-weight: normal; }

(if you have some odd reason for using Verdana and pt sizes).

It's safer _and_ clearer.

Do you mean that it uses, for the <strong> element in your example, some
font other than Verdana? That would be odd, unless there's some other style
sheet intervening.