You can look at the transparent title graphics on b.net. I think they look worse than the opaque ones on a wider range of backgrounds.

#subtext img { border:2px solid black } will give it a black border which might make it look less weird.

I'll give that a try, ita. I think it's the lack of border that just makes it look wrong.

World Wide Web Consortium

W3Schools

One useful thing is the Firebug extension on Firefox, which lets you see the style and html for each page you're on. I spent a lot of my time learning html and the css by looking at View Source on many, many pages, and Firebug makes it a lot easier to see how it works.

Don't think you're alone in being frustrated. I've been writing css for some years, and I'm still often frustrated. It's as far away from intuitive as you can get.

I haven't fiddled much with the B.org style because it seems too much like work.

I've got all the time in the world, right now, so I figured I may as well try to do something that could be useful down the road and actually learn some of this stuff. I've got the W3C tutorials bookmarked, but the book I bought actually has some tutorials on their website that work with some pretty sophisticated looking pages. And I really like the way the book is written, it's not just line after line of code, they have crossword puzzles and match games, it makes it fun! I feel like a kid with a puzzle book.

eta: Thank you all so much for your help. I've got the colors pretty much tweaked the way I want. I may get up trying new things like some of the border/buttons that Restless used. I hope.

Both FIreBug and the Safari 4 Beta let you edit the styles and see the changes in real time on the page. This can be very helpful for understanding how to make it look the way you want.

[link]

[link]

Why can't Opera do something like that? Though I have started poking into their development stuff and it's quite interesting.

eta: I take that back. I just have to get the hang of Dragonfly.

Okay, I'm possibly the slowest kid on the block, but did I really never know until now that when you threadsuck, it exposes whitefont? Is there a way to, you know, not do that?

There is a way not to do that, but we need to work out what we're breaking for other people first.

Also, a reminder, Bugtracker in the thread header is for feature requests. If you're serious about it, please put it there, because otherwise I end up with a soup of confusing bookmarks from this thread, and other people can't see what's been requested/reported.

There is a way not to do that, but we need to work out what we're breaking for other people first.

...anyone else think Amazon should hire ita?

I will make a suggestion in the Bugtracker! I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing something obvious first...