Can you override the "<big>" tag with CSS?

N

Nocturnal

I use IE7 and I also use an external style sheet to format the web pages I
view. I view everything in Verdana, size 9 or 13px.

There is a stubborn website in which they use the <big> tag and even by
putting this:

big
{
font-size: 13px
font size: 13px
}

I am still unable to get it to use my CSS settings instead of it's own big
settings.

Any help is appreciated.
 
J

Jukka K. Korpela

Nocturnal said:
I use IE7 and I also use an external style sheet to format the web
pages I view. I view everything in Verdana, size 9 or 13px.

I suppose "an external style sheet" here means "user style sheet" (which is,
by its essence, external to any HTML document).
There is a stubborn website in which they use the <big> tag and even
by putting this:

big
{
font-size: 13px
font size: 13px
}

As Spartanicus pointed out (somewhat indirectly), there is a syntax error in
this style sheet. This probably has no effect on the problem, since IE 7
behaves as if "font size: 13px" were not there. (I'm too lazy to check the
CSS error processing rules to see whether this is correct.)

You should have posted the URL of the site or page so that we could have
checked what its CSS code really contains.
I am still unable to get it to use my CSS settings instead of it's
own big settings.

So what did you try? You should have copied and pasted your user style sheet
if it is short and uploaded it onto a web server and posted the URL
otherwise. How could we otherwise see what you have tried?

The obvious way is

big { font-size: 100% !important; }

and this nullifies both the default effect of <big> markup and any font-size
setting for it in an author style sheet. The specified !important is not
needed for nullifying the default effect (conceptually, defeating a default
browser style sheet) but it is needed for overriding a setting in an author
style sheet.

Generally, if you _really_ want to view everything in, say, 9px Verdana,
then

* { font: 9px Verdana !important; }

in a user style sheet does that on IE 7. Whether this is useful is debatable
and depends on the browsing situation as well as the user style sheet as a
whole. If you override the default rendering of headings in larger font
sizes, you should consider how to recognize them as headings.

I wouldn't normally override even the effect of <big> and <small>, since
they typically have a message to convey. In particular, <big> is often
used - in poor authoring style - to make texts look like headings.
 
T

Toby Inkster

Jukka said:
As Spartanicus pointed out (somewhat indirectly), there is a syntax error in
this style sheet. This probably has no effect on the problem, since IE 7
behaves as if "font size: 13px" were not there. (I'm too lazy to check the
CSS error processing rules to see whether this is correct.)

In this case, the missing semi-colon after the first "13px" is probably
the bigger error.
 

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