Posted on 3 Comments

Programming self into corner

With programming, over thinking a problem is a common pitfall. Sleeping on a problem often results in a quick solution for the mere fact that you quit thinking about the issue long enough to see the simpler solution. As we contrive our Rube Goldberg devices to solving programming challenges, we become like plumbers simply adding more pipes to divert the water to the end result. Quickly we paint ourselves into a corner and waste valuable time. I am there right now on what should be some simple css.

If I have a <tr> that has a class <tr class="foo"> and the <td> within the tr has an <a href> how do I style the anchor?

Before anyone jumps on the "Don’t use tables" bandwagon, this is semantically correct because the output is tabular data.

The solution should be tr.foo td a { }. But nothing changes. CSS is not magic; not spooky. CSS is relatively simple, and fun! But hiccups like this drive me to the brink!

3 thoughts on “Programming self into corner

  1. Don’t embedded classes supercede their parent classes? If I first set up:

    a.class1 {color: White;}

    gave <a href="" rel="nofollow">, then even if the class assigned to the statement the <a> statement is embedded in says {color: black}, the link color will be white. Right?

  2. Hmm… talking about coding in a comment doesn’t work well, does it?

  3. I did a little editing in the comment and now it looks right. Speaking of right. The solution to my problem to move the import reference. My style sheet read:

    .this{ … }
    #that { … }
    @import (url);

    The correct way to do it is to include the imports before any declarations:

    @import (url);
    .this{ … }
    #that { … }

    Then the styles work.

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