Chapter 7. Basic Visual Formatting
In the previous chapters, we covered a great deal of practical
information on how CSS handles text and fonts in a document. In this
chapter, we look at the theoretical side of visual rendering,
answering many of the questions we skipped over earlier in the
interest of addressing how CSS is implemented.
Why is it necessary to spend an entire chapter on the theoretical
underpinnings of visual rendering in CSS? The answer is that with a
model as open and powerful as that contained within CSS, no book
could hope to cover every possible way of combining properties and
effects. You will obviously go on to discover new ways of using CSS
for your own document effects.
In the course of exploring CSS, you may encounter seemingly strange
behaviors in user agents. With a thorough grasp of how the visual
rendering model works in CSS, you'll be able to
determine whether a behavior is a correct (if unexpected) consequence
of the rendering engine CSS defines or whether
you've stumbled across a bug that needs to be
reported.
| 