IE6 and cascading - an issue I've never seen

>>>> div#message.info

Is that valid? I've never seen an ID and class declaration like that.

I think it's valid. Firefox understands this.

yea, it's valid, but I'll be blowed if I can remember what it's called, if indeed it has a name :o

It's a "simple" selector without a combinator

I've found a given example in conjuction with using multiple class selectors [w3.org]

p.marine.pastoral { color: green }

IMHO, it all hinges on the word combinators, with CSS there are various ways to combine selectors and these are described in the Selector Syntax [w3.org] part of the spec.. however as usual when forced to read and interpret a recommendation it's nae easy ;)

A selector is a chain of one or more simple selectors separated by combinators. Combinators are: whitespace, ">", and "+". Whitespace may appear between a combinator and the simple selectors around it.

The elements of the document tree that match a selector are called subjects of the selector. A selector consisting of a single simple selector matches any element satisfying its requirements. Prepending a simple selector and combinator to a chain imposes additional matching constraints, so the subjects of a selector are always a subset of the elements matching the last simple selector.

So my reading of that is that a selector can be a chain, separated by one of 3 different combinators; the example given by moltar and the CSS2.1 multiple class example does not need or use a combinator, there is no whitespace, or indeed anything else (in fact if there were whitespace between the simple selectors it would alter the target) - so to my interpretation this is a really really simple selector which simply says the selector has to match all.

I do have some vague recollection of reading something previously about IE and this type of selector, where it only matched the last selector in a chain, but I've ran some tests and all seems OK so perhaps (even if a problem did exist briefly) it was fixed between IE7beta and release, and back testing seems to back up moltars claim, in that it always was OK!

anyway no matter, moltar the code you gave is working fine for me, as in I am not seeing the default color and I am seeing the green or red border depending on which class I put in the HTML, what's the doctype and context and sorry for being cheeky but is the speeling and case correct?

[edited by: SuzyUK at 6:03 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2008]

I think you're seeing a known bug in IE6: "The multiple #id.class bug", where it renders only the first CSS for the ID and skips the subsequent. Probably the only work-around is to drop the ID and use only the class selectors which may not be feasible if you're using them elsewhere.

SuzyUK: i was talking about IE6.

Edouard_H: that's probably what it is and I already switched to using classes and it works fine.

Thank you everyone!

Yeah you should just use two (or three) classes. The way you designed it as it is requires at least two elements with the same id, which is not good, even if they have different classes.