Quote:
Originally Posted by Turtle91
cool!
That kind of goes against my program-oriented background - being able to define a reserved tag as a user class (the difference between b and dot b). It certainly makes CSS more flexible. Although if I started doing that (using b and .b at the same time) I would probably confuse myself even more than I already do!!  |
Well, it's not exactly a reserved tag, it's just a tag with some intended semantics and some default style. Also, different renderers will probably have different default styles (a text-based browser could draw it with inverted background and foreground colours, a text-to-speech system could apply some voice inflection).
Maybe <b> is not the best example, but take <em>. It's intended to mean emphasis and, although its default style is often italic, you could want to have some other style in a given document (bold, underlined, red, different font, letterspaced...). So, not only you can override default styles, but it's sometimes a good idea to re-define them, when it is important. For instance, I often use:
Code:
em { font-style: italic; }
em em { font-style: normal; }
so I make sure that <em> is italic and <em> inside <em> is not.
And you can even make a <div> behave as a <span> (display: inline) and vice-versa (display: block). But there are some XHTML restrictions that still apply (a <span> or a <p> cannot contain a <div>, for instance). Since <p> cannot contain <div>, I sometimes create a special class of <span> that behaves as <div>, and then <p> can contain this <span>
