Andrew Thompson <SeeMySites@www.invalid> wrote:
[color=blue]
> body {
> font-family: sans-serif, serif;
> }[/color]
That would be an interesting rule. So you would specify the generic serif
font for those browsers that incorrectly fail to recognize the sans-serif
keyword?
[color=blue]
> It cascades down to other elements, that's part of what
> the 'C' in CSS, means.[/color]
No, it doesn't, and the C in "CSS" is almost always misunderstood
seriously.
A rule like
body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; }
(to take a sensible example) affects directly only "loose" text (i.e.,
text inside <body> but not inside any inner element), which by the way is
not allowed in HTML 4.01 Strict. It _may_ indirectly affect other text
too, via inheritance, but only if _no_ other style sheet being applied
sets font-family for them. For example, it does not affect form fields on
most (or any?) browsers, since the fields have font-family set in the
browser's default style sheet.
The basefont tag, on the other hand, has no direct counterpart in CSS,
since it has no reasonable _definition_ in HTML and the implementations
vary. The question really is: what do you _want_, as an author?
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ 
basefont 
