New York Public Library errors

Be aware of what you read.

The New York Public Library Style Guide is widely referred to on the web as a standard resource for using XHTML and CSS. Well, it looked good to me too until I actually tried using it and testing it. As you can see from the screen shots below, they apparently have some problems being compliant, not only to older browsers like IE 3.

Why we do browser testing.

The famous New York Public Library Style Guide as viewed in Internet Explorer 3.01 on a Mac.
This is what Pepino's looked like using their style sheets as viewed in IE 3.

Why we validate our web pages.

Note: The validation errors have since been corrected.

The New York Public Library Style Guide page on using validation being checked for valid CSS.

Ways to correct this behavior.

I haven't looked hard at their URI problem, but the first two screen shots of problems in IE 3 can be corrected easily. The line-height has got to be hidden from this browser. As they are using two style sheets (see Steal these Style Sheets), one simple and one sophisticated, the line-height could be moved to the sophisticated style sheet which IE 3 does not import.

Pull out this line from the simple sheet and move it to the sophisticated sheet:

ol, li, dl, dt, dd { line-height: 1.5em; }

Then for the p tag, rewrite it. This is the way it looked:

p {
	margin-top: 0; padding-top: 0;
	line-height: 1.5em;
	}

Leave the margin part on the simple sheet:

p { margin-top: 0; padding-top: 0; }

and then put the line-height part on the sophisticated sheet:

p {	line-height: 1.5em; }

With these changes, the style sheets then worked here in my browser lab.