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Inheritance

Navigator 4.x vs Netscape 6.x

The rules for when a certain element should inherit properties from other elements are many and complicated, and all browsers have their own limitations.

Navigator 4.x

One particularly nasty bug was Netscape 4's problems with inheritance in tables. Style did not ever, under any circumstances, inherit into TD and TH. The styles that were affected were all those that are inherited, including: the font-size.

The way to fix this in NS4 was to set redundant selectors like:

body, table, th, td {font-size: 85%;}

Netscape 6.x

Now in the case of a new strict-mode browser such as Netscape 6.x. this same rule will cause the font-size be very tiny. Netscape 6.x. inherits according to standards. So the danger in using percentages like this is that they will compound, resulting in type that is too small to read.

All elements in strict-mode will inherit styles, including table elements. A strict-mode browser will calculate the font-size for the body element and then propagate that computed value down to the descendant element that will in turn do the same.

This effect can be avoided by using:

body {font-size: 85%;}

The rest of the elements in a strict-mode browser such as Netscape 6.x will inherit the body's computed value unless they have been explicitly set to something else.