Sent by Mark Newhouse on 18 April 2002 12:12
As I read things in the spec [1], I can set my border-colors to transparent,
and still give them a width. This allows me to have a dotted border to show
up around my links on hover. (When a:links don't have a border, and your
a:hovers do, some UAs make the text jump around duet to the extra pixels in
your borders, so making the border transparent, and the same width as the
:hovered borders takes care of the jumping.)
So fine, I've done just that in my blog (see sig for URL). In IE5.x on Mac
and Windows, things work correctly. In IE6, I get a dark border around all
my links (the hover works correctly). This also happens with Opera on Mac
and Windows (if I use the border shorthand [see below for why I don't], it
works in Opera...).
Another (related) issue - if I use the border: 1px solid transparent; I get
an error when I validate the CSS. Is that correct? If I split things out (as
they are now in the style sheet [2]), everything validates. Is this an error
in the CSS validator?
Since I am currently just using this in a personal site, it's not that big a
deal, but I am curious about it. And curious why IE5.x/Windows works, but
IE6 doesn't...
--Mark Newhouse
We put the "blah" in blog...
<http://homepage.mac.com/iblog/>
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/box.html#border-color-properties
[2] http://homepage.mac.com/iblog/new.css
