[WEB4LIB] Re: Combining classes with CSS

[Thomas Dowling]

At 10:07 AM 3/14/2002, Kevin W. Bishop wrote:

>I don't know if it's "legal" to combine classes in a single element, but why?

It makes more sense when you have class names that describe the purpose of 
an element, and consider elements with multiple purposes.  The example 
given doesn't really suggest why a paragraph would be in the emphasis1 or 
marginmedium class.  But consider a script that displays, say, your 
subscribed electronic journals with holding statements, access info, 
etc.  Make it searchable by keyword, and decide that you'd like to 
highlight the field the user searched in--title, publisher, whatever.  In 
this context, it might be clearer why you'd want:

   <p class="search-string">You searched for journal titles with the
     word "Communications"</p>
   <p class="journal-title search-hit">Online Communications in Hit
     Highlighting</p>...

In other contexts, you might have table cells that have separate class 
relationships to their row and to their column, perhaps like: <th 
class="section-end subtotal">.  Or citations to articles where the main 
author is also a local faculty member: <span class="main-auth 
ego-stroke">.  And so on.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu

/* That's... */
.ego-stroke {
   font-size: 250%;
   font-weight: bold;
   text-decoration: blink;
}