Formatting text in a layer for NS4.7

Any suggestions at all as I'm all out of ideas ...

[Jeepers]

<totally lost>
I'm trying to format the font, colour, size, wieght and alignment of text written to a layer nested inside an ilayer inside a table cell in NS4.7. I have tried everthing I can think of, CSS, formatting the cell, inline style, nesting the whole lot inside a font tag. No matter what I do it displays in black, times new roman on the left.

The text is written to the layer by a function.

CSS works fine in IE6 & NS6, it's just NS4.7

Anybody any ideas at all.
</totally lost>

[papabaer]

Hello Jeepers,
Welcome to Webmaster World!

NN4 just about demands that CSS be declared for every element/container combination you can think of... Have you tried applying the styles to the NN4 propriety ilayer?

[Jeepers]

I have applied the style as a class from the style sheet and as a style within the ilayer and layer tags in about every combination I can think of. I have not found one thing that is affected by anything I do. However, all of the rest of the page uses the stylesheet perfectly. Annoying, very annoying.

[Jeepers]

If anybody is interested this the relevant code

This is the function that writes to the layer

function displayIt(theStr,dname,Lname,iLname){
 //if IE 4+
 if (document.all)
 document.all[dname].innerHTML=theStr;
 //else if NS 4
 else if (document.layers){
 document[iLname].document[Lname].document.write(theStr);
 document[iLname].document[Lname].document.close();
 }
 //else if NS 6 (supports new DOM)
 else if (document.getElementById){
 rng = document.createRange();
 el = document.getElementById(dname);
 rng.setStartBefore(el);
 htmlFrag = rng.createContextualFragment(theStr);
 while (el.hasChildNodes())
 el.removeChild(el.lastChild);
 el.appendChild(htmlFrag);
 }
}

this is the cell in which the layer to be written to is in

 <tr>
 <td class="HLS" width="582" colspan="4" height="25" align="center">
  <div id="d1" style="width:100%;height:25px"></div>
  <ilayer id="iL1" width=100% height=25px><layer id="L1" width=100% height=25px></layer></ilayer>
 </td>
 </tr>

This is part of a much bigger page in which there are a further two cells of a similar nature

And its called by

displayIt('This is the string I want to write','d1','L1','iL1');

from another function.

[tedster]

Styling the text inside a table cell often requires redundant style declarations. A couple more ideas:

1. Declare the font style for td
2. Write the text using full <p></p> tags, then...
3. Declare the style using p#iL1 and p#L1 as selectors
4. Give the relevant <p> tag its own ID or class name

[rewboss]

I've found that NS4 is so bad at applying styles to nested elements, that once you get past a certain level you can do whatever you like with class and id attributes, it just won't work. In many cases I've resorted to style attributes (<td style="font-family: ....">), which rather defeats the object of CSS in the first place.

Another consideration is that the implementation of <ilayer> is not terribly brilliant either.