Ernst Elzas wrote:
[color=blue]
> If these questions have been asked numerous times before, please excuse
> me, I have not managed to find the information I needed.[/color]
Your question seems to revolve around styling, not HTML. Hence it
belongs to the stylesheets group, and I set followups there. Therefore
I'm exceptionally quoting your entire message (though piecewise).
Your message contains several questions. All of them don't fit under
your Subject line, and you should actually have posted essentially
separate questions as separate messages.
[color=blue]
> I'm making a webpage (for now it will only be in two languages, English
> and Hebrew), and noticed a few issues with scrollbars:
> I divided the page in divs, with drop-down menus appearing in the
> top-div: (quoting the relevant lines from the css file)[/color]
You should have posted the URL.
I repeat, you should have posted the URL. You cannot have read the
comp.infosystems.
www.authoring groups much, if you have missed this
principle.
You should have posted the URL of your HTML document, letting us find
the markup as well as the stylesheet.
[color=blue]
> html,body {background-color: #000008; color:red; height: 100%;
> width:100%; position:relative; margin: 0; padding:
> 0;font-family:serif;overflow:auto;}[/color]
Are you serious? All text in red?
[color=blue]
> #content{clear:left;background-image:url("backgroundimage.jpg");background-repeat:no-repeat;background-attachment:fixed;background-position:50%
> 60%;background-color:#000008;;color:red;height:77%;width:80%;posi tion:absolute;left:10%;top:15%;overflow:auto;paddi ng:0;margin:0;}
> #copyright{background-color:transparent;color:gray;position:absolute;hei ght:5%;width:30%;top:92%;left:35%;text-align:center;vertical-align:middle;margi
> n:0;padding:0;}
> #banner{background-color:transparent;color:red;position:absolute;heig ht:10%;width:100%;margin:0;padding:0;left:0;top:0; text-align:center;vert
> ical-align:middle;font-size:200%;}
> #top{background-color:transparent;color:red;position:absolute;heig ht:5%;width:80%;margin:0;padding:0;left:10%;top:10 %;overflow:visible;}
> #left{background-color:transparent;color:red;position:absolute;heig ht:90%;width:10%;margin:0;padding:0;top:10%;left:0 ;}
> #right{background-color:transparent;color:red;position:absolute;heig ht:90%;width:10%;margin:0;padding:0;top:10%;left:9 0%;}
> body>div#banner{position:fixed;}
> body>div#top{position:fixed;}
> body>div#left{position:fixed;}
> body>div#right{position:fixed;}
> body>div#copyright{position:fixed;}
> body>div#content{position:fixed;}
> In the Hebrew version, only the content-div gets a slightly different
> lay-out, due to the drop-down menus appearing right-aligned instead of
> left-aligned:
> #content{clear:right;background-image:url("backgroundimage.jpg");background-repeat:no-repeat;background-attachment:fixed;background-position:50%
> 60%;background-color:transparent;color:red;height:77%;width:80%;p osition:absolute;left:10%;top:15%;overflow:auto;pa dding:0;margin:0;}[/color]
Sounds excessively complex, and position: fixed is often a mistake,
because IE does not support it. Besides, you haven't revealed is the
_markup_.
[color=blue]
> On a page where the contents of the content-div are small, no
> scrollbars should appear, where they are big, scrollbar should appear
> to the side of the content-div, the content of all the other divs is
> small enough to fit inside the div (but the drop-down menus will
> overflow to the content-div)[/color]
It's impossible to see what scrollbars you are talking about. Window or
element scrollbars?
[color=blue]
> In Trident-browsers, there was always a greyed-out vertical scrollbar
> on the side of the page, which should have been absent. I managed to
> make it disappear by adding overflow:auto to html,body (as seen above),[/color]
Sounds pointless. You should not worry about the greyed-out scrollbar
(on some browsers) before your pages are almost perfect, and you
probably have much more serious issues.
[color=blue]
> however, then, both a horizontal and vertical scrollbar appeared on
> the side of the document in the Hebrew version, although clicking again
> on a link to that page from within the same page does make them
> disappear. This does seem to happen only when switching from English to
> Hebrew, not when opening the Hebrew page directly.[/color]
That might be somewhat surprising, but is it a problem? To whom?
[color=blue]
> In Gecko-browsers a similar phenomenon occurs on one specific page. I
> made a list, not withstanding the fact that the displaystyle is not the
> on I want eventually, it's incorrectly displayed (in all browsers). The
> discs do not appear in the English version, but in the Gecko-browsers
> they do appear in the Hebrew version, unfortunately, the Gecko-browsers
> then also do put a horizontal scrollbar, without need for it, since the
> text wraps around, eliminating the need for a horizontal scrollbar.
> This effect does not happen in Presto- and Trident-browsers.[/color]
I still have no way of _seeing_ what you are talking about.
[color=blue]
> The css for the list (English version):
> ul.bullet{display:table-row-group;width:100%;position:absolute;left:auto;top:a uto;list-style-type:disc;background-color:transparent;}
> li.bullet{width:100%;height:10%;position:relative; border:thick;text-align:left;font-variant:normal;}
> and the Hebrew version:
> ul.bullet{display:table-row-group;width:100%;position:absolute;right:auto;top: auto;list-style-type:disc;background-color:transparent;}
> li.bullet{width:100%;height:10%;position:relative; border:thick;text-align:right;}[/color]
Did I mention that we need the URL?
[color=blue]
> Has anyone got any idea to get around the above mentioned problems?[/color]
The problems haven't been identified yet.
[color=blue]
> I started with XHTML1.0 strict[/color]
Pointless. The web is not ready for XHTML 1.0, or the XHTML 1.0 is not
suitable for the web. (Just two formulations so that you can pick up the
one that offends you less.)
[color=blue]
> and encoding UTF-8,[/color]
Probably a good idea for the Hebrew version, and if your English version
has a link to the Hebrew version with the link name in Hebrew (as it
should), you might as well use UTF-8 for the English version too.
[color=blue]
> but later switched the
> doc-type to XHTML1.1,[/color]
Even more pointless. XHTML 1.1 is an exercise in futility.
[color=blue]
> for some reason the document did validate, even
> before I switched conten from text/html to application/xhtml+xml.[/color]
Which means that the page does not work at all on IE.
To see why it does not validate, we would need the URL.
[color=blue]
> Doing
> that, which I did not know was officially required until today, did not
> change appearance in any browser I tested, nor did any of them ask how
> to open the page, even when using a link, an action which should at
> least have sent Internet Explorer running back to the hell it came
> from, as far as I understood.[/color]
That sounds like a complex way of saying "XHTML 1.1 does not work on the
WWW".
[color=blue]
> Another interesting aspect, something for which I looked in the
> guidelines for both CSS and XHTML, with no result, is the positioning
> of the scrollbar (on a Hebrew webpage).[/color]
How would that be an _HTML_ matter?
It's not an CSS matter either, really, because CSS has no tools for
specifying where a scroll bar should appear.
In practice, setting the writing direction to "rtl" (right to left)
tends to put the scroll bar on the left, which is rather natural, but
still just a browser feature.
[color=blue]
> This actually goes slightly
> further than my own webpage and might also be encoding dependent
> (although I checked different pages, some encoded in some extension of
> ASCII with support for Hebrew, others in UTF-8), what I've noticed is
> the following:
> Internet Explorer puts the scrollbar on the left-side.
> Opera puts the scrollbar on the right-side.
> Firefox sometimes puts it to the left (actually my page is the only one
> I know of where it is put on the left-side), sometimes to the right.
> Where should it be put? Is it possible to force[/color]
No.
[color=blue]
> all browsers to put it
> on the same side, without resorting to non-CSS, browser-dependent,
> CSS-like extensions and/or javascript?
> Note: the same seems, as expected, to hold for Arabic pages.[/color]
I'm surprised at the implicit thought here: you seem to think that such
things could and should be controlled in HTML.
[color=blue]
> On yet another note, I discovered that one should delete
> font-variant:small-caps for a section to be used with a language
> lacking capital letters, Firefox (and Mozilla itself as well) did then
> start to display Hebrew text from left to right instead of from right
> to left, where it should have ignored the font-variant for reason of
> nonexistence. I assume the same bug appears when doing this in other
> languages that don't have capital letters, but input would be welcome.[/color]
We would need the URL of a demo in order to estimate whether you have
found a bug (and what sort of bug) or just made a mistake in authoring.
On the other hand, it is often mentioned when discussing HTML authoring
in Hebrew and Arabic that you should use <html dir="rtl"> even though
this is often not needed by the specifications. Browsers should apply
the intrinsic directionality of characters, but they often fail to do
this, so dir="rtl" is a good idea. Since you did not post a URL, we
cannot see whether you had actually used that attribute, in which you
might need some other workaround.
On the other hand, font-variant: small-caps is of questionable value for
several reasons. In particular, browsers do not usually use genuine
small caps letters but reduced-size capital letters, which is a
typographically poor idea.
