lists

how NN and IE handle lists

page 4 of 4

page 1
• preface
page 2
• coloring behind levels
• changing the list type
page 3
• rethinking lists
page 4
• font sizes

font sizes

I was spurred on to write this piece about lists because of my own problems with lists. The original start page for this site has a list with nested sublists. I tried to control the list via style sheets and had a big surprise when I viewed the through NN4.7 and then IE5.0. I kept the formatting simple for the lists so I didn't have too many problems, but the control of font sizes continued to haunt me.

At the time, I wanted the list to have smaller fonts than the rest of the page. I wanted this effect on all the pages. I wound up finding that setting the font size in points worked well. However, this becomes a problem for high resolution viewers. I decided to go with the CSS value smaller for the property font-size.

UL {background:blue;width:55%;border-width:1px;
	font-size:smaller;}

we see in IE5.0:

NN4.7 falls down on this and loses formatting information after the nested UL is tags are closed, but look at IE5.0. It's rendering the code too well. The nested UL sublist is inherenting from the outer UL. It's making the font size smaller than smaller. NN6.0 does the same thing. That's not the desired effect.

In the end, because of the extreme problems with NN4.7 and lists, I gave up trying to nest lists and simply built a table and placed lists inside the cells of the table. Then, for the few nested lists I have on the site, I entirely gave up trying to control font size and left it to the browser.