Scripsit Haines Brown:
The following works nicely on my FireFox 1.0.4 as well as galeon:
<p>
<div class="rule"></div>, Bibliographic title with repeated
author...
</p>
It "works" only in the sense of performing (mostly by random) error
correction that happens to coincide with what you want. A <divelement
inside <pis prohibited by HTML syntax, and changing the display property
value does not affect this at all.
No access to IE to see if it works there.
It "works" in the same sense. This might be related to the beautiful weather
around here and the favorable position of Jupiter as well as the phase of
the moon.
A float had occurred to me,
but not with the clear. That would seem a good solution if it stuod up
with different browsers.
Well, yes, making the element floated lets you set its width effectively
(even on standards-conforming browsers).
But I think what you primarily need here is not CSS at all but some special
characters. Admittedly, the notations you want are comparable to list
bullets and might be logically handled using CSS, and could be handled using
generated content, but IE hasn't started supporting that yet. So in any
case, the practical solution is to insert some characters. This ensures that
the content is rendered OK even when CSS is off, though with the mild
reservation that the browser needs to support the characters you use.
It's not really rocket science characters. According to the Chicago Manual
of Style, for successive entries by the same authors, a 3-em dash followed
by a period or comma is used. Since 3-em dash does not exist as a separate
character, the practical choice is to use three em dashes:
———
(Support to — is almost universal in web browsers; people still using
older browsers can probably tolerate the problem caused, since they'll meet
it often anyway.)
This also gives a better rendering, since the typographic convention is to
use dashes, and they are in a considerably higher vertical position than a
bottom border is.
Now comes the CSS part. Consecutive em dashes should be joining, to give the
desired rendering. In some fonts they aren't. This is not catastrophic, but
you can check what happens with the fonts that you suggest in your CSS code,
and perhaps even use a different font for the dashes (even though this gets
clumsy, since you would need to wrap them inside some <span
class="em3">...</spanfor this). For example, in Times New Roman, Garamond,
and Arial em dashes are joining.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/