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seemingly simple CSS span, div, problem

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seemingly simple CSS span, div, problem Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) forum discussing all levels of CSS, including CSS1, CSS2 and CSS Positioning. CSS provides a robust way of applying standardized design concepts to your web pages.

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  #1  
Old September 30th, 2002, 11:30 AM
cpv204 cpv204 is offline
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seemingly simple CSS span, div, problem
I stumbled across this problem modifying someone else's code.

I have a stylesheet with two definitions:
PHP Code:
 a {font-size : 12px; color : black;}
a.small {font-size : 10px; color : red;} 

In my HTML file I have the following link:
PHP Code:
<span class="small"><a href="foo.php">LINK</a></span> 


The problem is that the link is being formatted according to the a{...} definition, that is, 12px and black, not 10 px and red like I want it.

The first thing I thought was that a <span> tag is only supposed to contain text, not tags, so I changed it to a <div> tag. Still the same result.

If I change my HTML to:
PHP Code:
<a href="foo.php" class="small">LINK</a> 
everything works fine. I get 10px and red text.

Why doesn't using a <span> or <div> tag around an <a> tag work like I think it should?
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  #2  
Old September 30th, 2002, 12:28 PM
degsy degsy is offline
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<a href="foo.php" class="small">LINK</a>
This is the correct method if you want the link to be affected by the CSS.

Elements can be defined in CSS
so using a will effect links.
using h1 will effect h1 (header) tags.


<span class="small"> is not effecting anything, because there is no style called small that can be associated with SPAN tags.

span.small
or
.small

would affect just the SPAN tag, but not the link.


Hope that makes sense, it's hard to describe briefly.
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  #3  
Old September 30th, 2002, 02:06 PM
cpv204 cpv204 is offline
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Thanks degsy. I understand what you're saying, but am confused about what I thought I knew about the <span> tag. I don't understand why the definitions of the span tag don't apply to the text in the anchor tags enclosed between the span tags.

Say my definitions are
PHP Code:
.red {color : red; font-family : Verdana;}
a {text-size : 12px;}
b {text-size : 12px;} 


If I use
PHP Code:
<span class="red">Here is some sample text</span> 
I get red, Verdana text in the browser default size. Good.

If I use
PHP Code:
<span class="red"><b>Here is some sample text</b></span> 
I get red, bold, 12px, Verdana text. Also good. Here the span affected the text within the <b> tags.

If I use
PHP Code:
<span class="red"><a href="foo.php">Here is some sample text</a></span> 
I get blue (default link color), 12px, Verdana text. Not good. The span did change the font, but not the color within the <a> tags. Why not?
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  #4  
Old September 30th, 2002, 02:14 PM
bricker42 bricker42 is offline
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You can use
Code:
span.small a {font-size : 10px; color : red;}
to get the effect you want.

The a tag has some implicit properties assigned to that you have to override. Things like color and text-decoration.
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  #5  
Old September 30th, 2002, 02:30 PM
cpv204 cpv204 is offline
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Aha! I like it, very subtle. It works.
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  #6  
Old September 30th, 2002, 02:39 PM
MJEggertson MJEggertson is offline
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It must be the way the browser implements default link colors. It likely has a default style implementation for anchors, probably something like this: a{color: blue; text-decoration: underline;}. Unless you explicitly override this, the anchor will appear as dictated by the default style.

Applying the color to the span won't set the anchor color, because the anchor still has the default anchor style set.

This is necessary to keep html 'simple.' If anchors inherited colors from their parent elements, something as simple as <body color="red">Click <a href="foo">here</a></body> would wipe out the coloring of the link, since the body's color declaration would propagate through all it's child elements.
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  #7  
Old October 1st, 2002, 05:10 PM
InOblivion InOblivion is offline
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cpv204:

This should work using div tags.

<style type="text/css">
<!--
#link a {
color: red;
font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
}
-->
</style>

<div id="link"><a href="link.html">a link</a></div>
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