Hi Travis,
I've done a fair bit of research into CSS and good UI design. I'm certainly no expert but I have looked up the theory of how it should work and now have a pretty good idea of common problems.
The underline trick should work as a standard and does work on many sites. It's definitely valid CSS with a standardised(ish) behaviour (border behaviour is pretty standardised with the exception of whether they're considered 'inside' space or 'outside' space). The problem here is that much of the forum uses pointless CSS trickery all over the place to, I assume, ensure each little bit looks identical on many browsers. And of course each module is written by a different author who uses their own different tricks, so there's not even a nice standard way to fix the problem.
For example the images next to the announcements aren't 'img' tags. They're simply 'a' links set with a background image and presumably a fixed size. What is worse is that they are inheriting this behaviour from the table they're contained in which makes debugging them hard.
Unfortunately there's little we could do about this aside from a) overriding each problem bit individually and hoping it works or b) abandoning the dots and going back to regular underlining.
Tim
I've done a fair bit of research into CSS and good UI design. I'm certainly no expert but I have looked up the theory of how it should work and now have a pretty good idea of common problems.
The underline trick should work as a standard and does work on many sites. It's definitely valid CSS with a standardised(ish) behaviour (border behaviour is pretty standardised with the exception of whether they're considered 'inside' space or 'outside' space). The problem here is that much of the forum uses pointless CSS trickery all over the place to, I assume, ensure each little bit looks identical on many browsers. And of course each module is written by a different author who uses their own different tricks, so there's not even a nice standard way to fix the problem.
For example the images next to the announcements aren't 'img' tags. They're simply 'a' links set with a background image and presumably a fixed size. What is worse is that they are inheriting this behaviour from the table they're contained in which makes debugging them hard.
Unfortunately there's little we could do about this aside from a) overriding each problem bit individually and hoping it works or b) abandoning the dots and going back to regular underlining.
Tim