Nancy Johnson wrote: > I got a css style sheet from a client that we are going to develop and > the following tags were included. I had never seen them before > > ins > kbd > samp > > Can anyone tell me what they are used for and the best time to use
The defined meaning and best usage of HTML tags are issues outside the scope of this list. I'd recommend checking first the HTML specifications, then some guidance like http://www.htmlhelp.com on their usage. Those elements are not used much, but an organization may well have decided to use them on their website and therefore pay attention to their styling. The styling issue is on-topic, and I think it needs to be noted first that typically kbd and samp are rendered by default in a monospace font. This may or may not be desirable. It basically reflects the old days when computer input and output appeared in a monospace font, and this "paradigm" might still be useful to convey a message. If you wish to override it, it is best to explicitly set font-family, since font-family: inherit does not work reliably (read: does not work on many IE versions still around). Generally, if kbd markup is used, it's often a good idea to distinguish the kbd content (indicating keyboard input by user) from other content that might (or might not) appear in a monospace font. It's more or less customary to use bolding, but you might also consider using distinctive background color. The ins element has no default styling different from normal rendering in old browsers, but modern browsers often display it as underlined. It's easy to override this by setting ins { text-decoration: none; } On the other hand, it's often useful to distinguish ins content (inserted text) from the rest, perhaps using some background color. If the documents are to be used on advanced browsers only, you could also insert some "insertion indicators" using ins:before and ins:after. -- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/