Puzzling behavior of "Text-indent"

[Christopher P. Winter]

I'm seeing some unexpected behavior with Text-indent, as shown on this
page:

http://www.chris-winter.com/Digressi.../My_Kayak.html

I set up the following style rules for footnotes:
DIV.FootRule { Border-bottom: 1px Solid Gray; Margin-bottom:
2px; Text-align: Left; Width: 20% }

DIV.FootText { Font-family: "Times New Roman", Serif;
Font-size: Smaller;
Margin: 0 0 0.75em 0.5em;
Text-align: Left; Text-indent: -0.75em }

DIV.Foot-Ele { Padding: 0 0.5em; Text-indent: -0.75em }

SPAN.FootMark { Background-color: Transparent; Color: Blue;
Font-size: Smaller; Vertical-align: Super }
They work all right, but a minor annoyance is that in the list at the
bottom of the page, the second and subsequent lines of each footnote wrap
under the footnote number instead of being indented a small, adjustable
amount.

The DIV "FootText" is supposed to set all styles for text within it, and
it does that -- except for the Text-indent style. That only affects the first
footnote; apparently it's being cut off by the <BR>.

I can get the behavior I want by enclosing each footnote in its own DIV,
as shown commented out in this example from the same page:

<DIV Class="FootRule"></DIV>
<DIV Class="FootText">

<!-- DIV Class="Foot-Ele" --><SPAN Class="FootMark">1</SPAN> CFD is not
the <EM>most</EM> demanding computational task, of course. Nuclear weapons
design, climate prediction, and many problems in astrophysics or
bioinformatics far out-rank (or "out-crank") it. But it is among the most
demanding problems I can hope to work on using a home system.<!-- /DIV
--><BR>

<SPAN Class="FootMark">2</SPAN> The evolution of HP Personal Workstations
continues, of course. The Kayak line gave way to three "Visualize" models
using top-of-the-line Pentium-III chips and HP's Visualize fx graphics cards,
specially developed for speedy 3-D modeling work. Subsequent workstations
incorporate the Pentium 4.<BR>

<SPAN Class="FootMark">3</SPAN> A cautionary note: While searching on eBay,
I've seen P3 steppings offered that Mueller does not list. It may be that his
remarkable success with the "PC Upgrade" series &mdash; long regarded as the
bible of the topic &mdash; has led him to get sloppy.

</DIV>

But this is cumbersome, and would mean retrofitting every page that uses
footnotes. So I hope I'm missing something and can get it to work the first
way. Any advice would be appreciated.

IE 6, Firefox 1 and Mozilla 1.7.10 work the same. (On-line, in fact, they
don't show any text indent at all. I guess this is due to browser
non-compliance with standards.)

[Christopher P. Winter]

On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 03:46:31 GMT, Christopher P. Winter
<ch******@chrisw20.best.vwh.net> wrote:

...a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
OK, assign me 2 demerits for laziness. After some more searching, I found
this:

http://www.usask.ca/mirrors/indexdot...textindent.htm

What is it?
This property specifies the horizontal indent from the left side
of the current parent Block Element for the first line in the
current Block. The indent is only applied at the beginning of the
block and not after any intervening line-breaking elements (like
BR.)

But I note that section 16.1 of the CSS 2.1 spec doesn't explain this
very well.