Understanding What CSS Can/Can’t Do

  • Unknown's avatar
    americanelephant · Member ·

    It helps a lot! Helps me understand much better how html and css work.

    I also wanted to let you know, I dipped my toe into CSS and tried flipping the sidebar as you instructed me, and lo and behold! it worked exactly as you said it would (with the problems you predicted) I was very excited!

    I was then able to figure out how to put the sidebar back on the left, and align the text and the headlines on the right, which improved the look a little bit, all by my little old self!

    So you have definately been an enormous help. I’m going to dip my toe in a little further and take a tutorial, and go from there, but I wanted to thank you for being so generous with your time in explaining things to me! You certainly didn’t have to, and it was very nice of you.

    Thank you again, very much, for all your help!

    I guess the moderators can mark this thread as resolved.

  • Unknown's avatar
    americanelephant · Member ·

    I lied.

    One LAST question. I promise.

    Could I get my footer image with no text over it by using the CSS for benevolence in the sandbox theme? (I’m assuming sandbox html <i>would</i> allow a “footer” image?)

  • Unknown's avatar
    singularcontiguity · Member ·

    You’re welcome.

    I’m not sure that you can use the Benevolence CSS with Sandbox. I’m familiar with how CSS works with (X)HTML / XML, but I haven’t really played with it yet here on WordPress. I’m planning on going the custom CSS route with my blog, and may well end up using Sandbox. So far, though, I’ve been more focused on writing and on my thesis research. :-)

    As far as I’m aware, the HTML produced by the various themes is sufficiently different that you can’t just grab the CSS from one theme and apply it to another. When we write CSS, the selectors that tell the browser to apply the style rules to the elements assume a certain structure to the HTML (containment hierarchy, ids, classes, etc.), so I don’t think you can just apply the Benevolence CSS to the Sandbox theme and have it work. (Sorry if this isn’t completely clear; it’ll make sense if you have some basic familiarity with HTML and go through a decent CSS tutorial.)

    That said, someone may already have created the CSS needed to make Sandbox look like Benevolence. If you want to look at using Sandbox, it might be worthwhile to look around and see what “skins” people have developed for it. You might find something that works as well as (or better than) Benevolence for your purposes.

    Good luck!

  • Unknown's avatar
    boblets · Member ·

    One thing I would like to add: CSS is great fun!
    And it’s not that hard to learn.
    Start from scratch – if you go via other set codes, you will end up doing the whole job all over anyway.
    Start with a very small, basic css-file, and go from there. You can do that locally on your own machine – you don’t need to do this online. From the start, set all css-containers to have a 1px border in diffrent colours. Otherwise you might get lost – as I frequently do – and you will see where problems arise. Simply comment them out when done. (use /* */ as Explorer do not recognise //)
    Another thing: if you find a css-site you like, open the source code, find the name of the css-file in the header, type in in the url, and voila- you can study the ropes and pulleys.

    Be veeery careful of browser compatability – (whatch what happens between Firefox and Explorer ) this can be a nightmare when things get a little complex.
    All the best & good luck.

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