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

in post <news:e6e4943e.0312270336.7caf98ba@posting.google.com>
miked said:

#ffffff no quotes

#000000 no quotes

100%

monospace

instead of just making stuff up have you considered reading a tutorial
or two?

Only two of the declarations are formally correct by CSS
specifications, and they too are very poor pragmatically. Instead of
explaining all the details of why the above is all wrong, here's a
sensible rule:

p { color: #fff; background: #000; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; }

But the background applies to the p element, not just the text inside
it. This is how things are by definition in CSS.

There's no such concept as "the text itself" in CSS.

In a weird way, you are right in an odd sense. Some previous versions
of some browsers got it wrong, coloring just the text (I guess this
applies mainly to NN 4, the zombie), which is what you want here. That
is, what you want is what browsers definitely must not do when a rule
like the above is used.

What you can do is to add a level of markup, making the content of the
p element an inline element, to which you can then apply background in
a manner that works by the rendering model of inline elements:

<p><span>Body text goes here.</span></p>

And you would then use p.span instead of p in CSS. Naturally, if you
use some properties that apply toblock elements only, you would use the
selector p when setting them (e.g., p { margin-left: 1em; }).