Re: [docbook-apps] styling links

[Brett Leber <bleber+@cs.cmu.edu>]

Not sure who maintains the xhtml stylesheets, but it might be a nice 
improvement to drop the <a> anchors altogether and just use the id 
attribute on elements, which can be linked to using the standard <a 
href="#blah">:

http://bitesizestandards.com/bites/cleaning-up-code-with-semantic-anchors

That's an off-the-cuff comment; I'm not sure what other XSL changes that 
might entail.

With regard to browser support, the article linked above has:

> Note that Netscape 4 does not properly support this, neither do some mobile browsers. In the case of the latter, at least, we can expect them to add support for this in the foreseeable future, whereas those who still have to support Netscape 4 will be less fortunate.

Java's HTML rendered may or may not work with this approach, so that'd 
be a deal-breaker. But this could be a nice enhancement to the xhtml 
stylesheets.

Brett

PS: For CSS questions, I recommend the excellent css-d list:
http://www.css-discuss.org/

On 12/3/2007 3:37 PM, David Cramer wrote:
> I ran across a little more info about this. If you do what I suggested
> previously, a[href]{ color: red; text-decoration: underline;}, then your
> problem is fixed in firefox, but you've got a new problem in IE (in 7
> anyway...not sure about others). It appears that IE 7 doesn't recognize
> the a[href] selector. So your caught between a mozilla bug (inabiilty to
> see that <a/> is the same as <a></a>) and an IE bug (inabilty to
> recognize a[href]). So here's my advice:
> 
> 1. Don't style link text (best approach...I don't style them except for
> this one css that I inherited, which is where I ran across this problem)
> 2. If you do, ask someone on a css list how to deal with the problem,
> given that your content will have lots of <a id="foo"/> tags and you
> can't/don't want to force them to be <a id="foo"></a>.
> 3. You could try getting your output to look like this, but I'm no css
> expert. This seems to handle IE and Firefox, but I don't know about
> other browsers:
> 
> <style type="text/css" media="screen">
> a[href]{ color: red; text-decoration: none;}
> </style>
> <!--[if IE]>
> <style type="text/css" media="screen">
> a{ color: red; text-decoration: none;}
> </style>
> <![endif]-->
>  
> David
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Johnson, Eric [mailto:Eric.Johnson@iona.com] 
>> Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 9:39 AM
>> To: David Cramer; Barton Wright
>> Cc: docbook-apps
>> Subject: RE: [docbook-apps] Weird characters in generated HTML
>>
>>  David,
>> The change to the CSS did the trick!! Thanks.
>> Cheers,
>> Eric
>>
>