Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Aha! I just learned how to override the definitions in a CSS style sheet!

Here's the problem. I use a CSS style sheet to define the properties of the HTML elements on this page. In fact, I load four style sheets with different definitions and let you click on the "Are you color blind?" link at the top of the page to determine which style sheet is in effect. The style sheet defines the <p> element as having brown text. If I want some portion of the text to have a different color — as in the final paragraph of the entry below with the picture of Michael Jackson — the following will not work:

<p><font color="red">this should be red</font></p>

The CSS definition overrides the local change. But, if you express the font change in the syntax of a CSS definition, it works:

<p><font style="color: red">this should be red </font></p>

This is explained in more detail than I could understand by David Baron. And here I learned how to do a relative size decrease:

<p><font style="font-size: 80%">This should be 80% the size of the rest of the text </font></p>

Woohoo! Sure, I should have known this, but then would I have gotten the same kick out of learning it?