things NN won't do

when NN fails to respond intuitively

page 3 of 8

page 1
• margins and headers
• margins and headers with width
page 2
• setting div margins in a table cell
• setting div width in a table cell
• adding a border
page 3
• setting color of text in tables
• name anchor references
page 4
• closing table tag
• span tag
• negative margins
page 5
• broken images and alt text
• the title attribute
page 6
• the height attribute
page 7
• the pseudo classes
page 8
• iframes

setting color of text in tables

Normally one might want to set the color of text for the entire page, and site, through the BODY tag. By using the COLOR property, we can set the color for the page. Below is the style code and the page code that shows one line of text inside of paragraph tags, and a table not nested inside any other tags.

body {color:red}
<p>
Here is some text inside paragraph tags and outside of the table
</p>
<table border=1>
<tr><td>more text</td><td>more text</td></tr>
<tr><td>more text</td><td>more text</td></tr>
</table>


we see in NN4.7:	we see in IE5.0 and NN6.0:

NN4.7 refuses to color the text that is inside of the table.

Actually, I have found that NN4.7 is pretty buggy with coloring text using the COLOR property in the BODY tag. NN4.7 will correctly color text throughout a page until some arbitrary point where the text will revert to the default color. In order to get text to color reliably in NN4.7, I have found that I must set the COLOR property in the P tag to the same color in the BODY tag.

name anchor references

If you're a NN4.7 user and visited the site in April 2000, you've probably noticed that the pink (then aqua) boxes that allow you to reach the top of the document from after each section were not working. This is yet another thing NN4.7 won't do intuitively. Let's look at the code for these aqua boxes on this page.

First the style for the boxes.

.returnbox {position:relative;left:4.4in;background:aqua;
width:1.0in;border-width:1px;
padding:6px;padding-left:0.4in;border-color:lightblue}


Now the use of the style to make the return link and its formatting.

<div class="returnbox"><a href="#toc">§<br>top</a></div>

NN4.7 will not even recognize the anchor as long as it's in the DIV tag. I've tried taking out the HTML formatting (the BREAK tag) and the entity (the section symbol). Only by removing the DIV tag will the link work.

The workaround I made for this site involved removing the POSITION property and setting the margins by percentages. This replaced the LEFT property and the WIDTH property.