Keep up the good work.

To repair you can append the following to the boxc b.cn rule:

line-height: 1px;
font-size: 1px;

Regards Nikolaj

That solution is pretty simple (compare it to the above “+20 elements, +20 rules for a rounded corner”), doesn’t necessarily require extra-markup, and works pretty well most of the time (unless the rounded containers are very small and increased font size thus breaks them rather fast, and unless we’re talking about completely liquid boxes).

So well, I highly respect Tantek’s and Eric’s expertise, but the above technique should not be used. It is general web dev “bad practice”, and one of the drawbacks will definitely be the increased cost of a later redesign (since you decided to cover over with markup rubbish). Here, the cost of solution is definitely higher than the cost of the problem …

I tried to use the technique described here to create rounded corners.

I turned out that the code snippets are a bit incomplete, which made me seek the original technorati solution myself.

One of the more crucial findings was that the following css rule is missing in the snippets:

b.cn {
position: absolute;
…
}

You asserted “you’re stuck with XHTML 1.0 or lower” – that’s kind of like saying “you’re stuck with everything that works well today”. What precisely is the real world problem you are pointing out?

How does using XHTML 1.0 break validation or use deprecated elements? W3C for some reason left the purely presentational B tag in XHTML 1.0 Strict without deprecating it (probably for political reasons, I’m guessing), so rather than complain about it being there and people misusing it, we declare a new use for it that makes much more sense. And it looks like Sune has answered the other question.

Jesper -> The dutch law allows the use of validated HTML 4.01, so the b-tag is an option (i know it’s a detail, but allow me to benefit from the hours i spend reading about it :o)

Your explanation leads me to another question, though.

Using a <b>-tag means that you’re stuck with XHTML 1.0 or lower. It must have been a tough decision to make. I mean, either use an older HTML standard or break validation and have pages with validation errors.

What’s the worst thing to do? Break validation or use deprecated elements?

I think that’s an interesting question seen in the perspective that Roger Johansson and Peter Paul Koch points out that the recent Dutch accessibility law actually forbids the use of deprecated elements on government sites.

What are your opinions on this?