a real newbie question

[StIcKs]

Hi. I'm just learning css and am stuck already. I have the properties for my paragraph tags in my linked style sheet which work fine. But how do I specify properties for normal body text not in a paragraph - because using paragraph inserts a gap which I don't want. Hope this makes sense

[Marina]

You could use the <span> tag like this:
<span class="yourcssclass">Here is the text.</span>

[weirdbeardmt]

If you have in your stylesheet:

BODY {

font-family: verdana;
color: #FFFFFF;

}

then anything that appears on your page, that is not contained within other tags (for e.g. <P> or <TD>) then it will show up on the page with these properties.

Is this what you meant or not?!

[StIcKs]

Weirdbeadmt - that is what I meant and had tried but my text was in a <td>. Now I know why it didn't work

Marina - your idea has worked perfectly. Thanks to you both.

[weirdbeardmt]

just checking, but you know you can do

<td class="yourclass">

don't you? this is the one i use the most!

you can apply it to the whole table as well, and in fact the list goes on quite a while!

good luck with the CSS. Just give us a yell if you get stuck again!

[dhtmlgod]

ive found that if you want a font globally on a page, the best thing to do is define the body tag and the table tag

BODY { font-family: verdana; color: #FFFFFF; } 
TABLE { font-family: verdana; color: #FFFFFF; }

[StIcKs]

Thanks guys for all the replies. Not sure what I've done but now my page is a complete disaster in Netscape Am going to start again and no doubt I'll be back pleading for help.

[StIcKs]

Oh no I'm back
I started again and now my page is not quite such a disaster but Netscape doesn't seem to be reading my <span class> properties from my style sheet. Because of this it puts the page out of alignment. Is <span> not Netscape compatible?

If someone doesn't mind having a quick look the page is at http://www.peria.school.nz and the style sheet is on the site - school.css

Thanks again.

[weirdbeardmt]

Hey sticks,

Thanks for the link. It is always easier to advise when being able to look at the problem!

Anyway I checked in IE5 and NS6, and I'm afraid, they both looked as good as each other! I couldn't spot much difference between the two, except that the colours in the logos dont quite match up in NS (fine in IE). (1024x768, Win98 16 Bit)

I took a look at your stylesheet as well, and that looked fine too. The only thing I would mention is adding more fonts in your font-family tags, on the offchance that someone views without verdana. they would then be left with system defaults, normally Times New Roman.

Good work though!

[Saz]

At the risk of repeating myself as I've mentioned this program soooooooooo many times since TheOriginalH told me about it.........

You can download a program called Topstyle, made by a company called Bradsoft. It's a brilliant CSS editor and has a validator included with it. It will check through your style sheet and validate it against different browsers so you can see at a glance which styles won't work. I love this program and use it a hell of a lot.

The version you download is nagware, so you get messages come up reminding you to purchase it, but at under $50, buying it would be money well spent.

[StIcKs]

weirdbeardmt - afraid?? You had me worried there for a minute. Thanks heaps for having a look. It must be my version of Netscape which is old - 4.03

Saz - thanks for the tip and I'll follow your advice.

Now on to the rest of the pages.

[dhtmlgod]

topstyle is a great program! i got it free with homesite and its great, i really suggest you download it

[weirdbeardmt]

Originally posted by StIcKs
weirdbeardmt - afraid?? You had me worried there for a minute. Thanks heaps for having a look

That was my intention!! Sorry, it was a bit mean!

Older versions of NS are less tolerant (esp. 4.7) so that might well be your problem. In NS6 everything looked good (except the logo colours not matching...)