should the font-family of the body tag apply to all content within?

**spaceman** · Mar 7, 2003 00:43

Let's say I define the font-family for my body tag to be arial. Assuming I don't define any other tag to be any other font-family, does this mean that all my page content contained within the opening and closing body tags will also be arial - even if that content is contained within other tags such as div, table, td, p, etc?

My hunch is that, for fully CSS compliant browsers, this should be true. But in reality not all browsers will be so well behaved.

Or perhaps I'm completely wrong? Perhaps official CSS standards do not say that this should be true?

Comments anyone?

Thanks.

**Zopester** · Mar 7, 2003 02:33

AFAIK it's true for modern browsers, but NN4 (oh there's a surprise) needs font-family specifying on basically every child of body. Tedious, but necessary.

**Ian Glass** · Mar 7, 2003 02:52

By the rules of CSS inheritance, yeah, it should work fine except where you (or the browser, like in <pre> sections or <textarea>s/<input>s) over ride it. :-)

~~Ian

**spaceman** · Mar 7, 2003 03:16

Originally Posted by Ian Glass

By the rules of CSS inheritance, yeah, it should work fine except where you (or the browser, like in <pre> sections or <textarea>s/<input>s) over ride it. :-)

~~Ian

Thanks for the w3 inheritance link.

I'm curious: with regard to your point about an <input> tag overriding the font-family setting in the body tag - why wouldn't the standards allow for the <input> tag to inherit the <body> tag font-family setting? I mean, I know what you're saying is true because I've observed it myself, but I'd like to know what the thinking is behind that.

**redux** · Mar 7, 2003 03:56

i believe the general thinking is that rendering of inputs and textareas is the job of the browser/OS, rather than simply being part of your page. that's why some things still can't be styled (e.g. the "dropdown arrow" thingy on select lists). it's also the thinking behind not making the IE proprietary scrollbar styles a standard...
getting back to NN4.x, i used to "overload" my stylesheets to ensure a consistent font:

Code:

html, body, p, td {
    font-family: whatever;
}

but that got me into some weird troubles once i started using em to define font sizes...so now i just ignore NN4.x

**spaceman** · Mar 8, 2003 20:14

Originally Posted by redux

i believe the general thinking is that rendering of inputs and textareas is the job of the browser/OS, rather than simply being part of your page. that's why some things still can't be styled (e.g. the "dropdown arrow" thingy on select lists). it's also the thinking behind not making the IE proprietary scrollbar styles a standard...
getting back to NN4.x, i used to "overload" my stylesheets to ensure a consistent font:

Code:

html, body, p, td {
    font-family: whatever;
}

but that got me into some weird troubles once i started using em to define font sizes...so now i just ignore NN4.x

Thanks for your thoughts, redux. I'm currently/mostly doing exactly as per your example above, but have also reached the point where I feel comfortable adandoning any lingering respect for NN4.x

Off-topic: As for using em to define font sizes... aaargh! I'm a px boy myself, but I've seen this debate rage all over the web for a couple of years, so best we don't go there, eh? :-). Unless of course you can point me to a recent article which takes absolutely everything into consideration and comes out strongly in favour of em...

Thanks again.

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