Hi all,

I must be re-inventing the wheel, but I can't seem to find a stylesheet
for bibliographies.  I'm probably inputting the wrong keywords into
Google...  Well, I gave up searching and since I needed an excuse to
try to learn CSS anyway, I gave it a try.  But, I'm stuck with one
thing.

With the book and the help pages I've read so far, all of the examples
have to do with making text within a set of tags colored, italics, etc.
Is it possible to use a stylesheet to ADD text?  For example:

<atitle>This is some title</atitle>

to become

"This is some title".

Or is the only way to do this is to explicitly put punctuation marks
inside.  As in:

<atitle>"This is some title".</atitle>

I would like a style sheet to do it because every title will be
enclosed in quotation marks and end in a period.  Is this considered a
"style"?

Thank you in advance!

Ray

On 16 Sep 2005 08:08:13 -0700, raykyoto@XXXXXXXXXX wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I must be re-inventing the wheel, but I can't seem to find a stylesheet
> for bibliographies.  I'm probably inputting the wrong keywords into
> Google...  Well, I gave up searching and since I needed an excuse to
> try to learn CSS anyway, I gave it a try.  But, I'm stuck with one
> thing.
>
> With the book and the help pages I've read so far, all of the examples
> have to do with making text within a set of tags colored, italics, etc.
>  Is it possible to use a stylesheet to ADD text?  For example:
>
> <atitle>This is some title</atitle>
>
> to become
>
> "This is some title".
>
> Or is the only way to do this is to explicitly put punctuation marks
> inside.  As in:
>
> <atitle>"This is some title".</atitle>
>
> I would like a style sheet to do it because every title will be
> enclosed in quotation marks and end in a period.  Is this considered a
> "style"?
>
> Thank you in advance!
>
> Ray

I don't think you can do this with CSS, it seems more the sort of thing to
be done via a scripting language like PHP where it would be very easy.

Or as you say "explicitly put punctuation marks inside". Easy but time
consuming if you have a lot of records.

"Martin Geisler" <mgeisler@mgeisler.net> wrote in message news:87psr8gek4.fsf@futtelifut.dy
ndns.org...
> On 16 Sep 2005 08:08:13 -0700, raykyoto@XXXXXXXXXX wrote: 
>
> You cannot invent new elements like that --- you have to stick with
> the elements defined by (X)HTML.

well, actually you can, but they won't be necessarily rendered by agents ;-)
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/own-dtd.html

>  But you can write
>
>   <p class="title">This is some title</p>
>
> to mark a paragraph as being a title with regard to the CSS rules you
> write.  To have quotation marks added automatically use the :before
> and :after pseudo-classes together with the content property:
>
>   http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/generate.html#content
>
> A stylesheet like this would work in your case:
>
>   p.title:before {
>     content: "“";
^^^ que???
>   }
>
>   p.title:after {
>     content: ".”";
^^^ huh???
>   }
>
> It works in some modern browsers, such as Firefox.

what's that in the before/after content? (after the period)

Hi,

Lauri Raittila wrote:
> in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets, raykyoto@XXXXXXXXXX wrote: 
> Unless I am mistaken, it shoudl not work, you need to escape " or use
> curly one in right encoding. If you did escape those quotes, then it
> should work on Opera 6+ as well, but not in IE. (URL would be much more
> useful than code here...)

Ah!  Sorry, but I'm just playing around locally on my home computer.  I
haven't gotten as far as actually putting it on-line.  I probably won't
go that far...feels like php is the right way to go.
 
> Yes, you could also change your own xml to (x)html in process.

Another reason to go the php route...  Thank you all for your help!  :)

Ray

Hi all,

Thank you for your replies!  Adding that to the p tag wasn't what I had
in mind, but I did give it a try and it seemed to work.  I then played
around and tried this:

atitle:before {
content: """;
}

atitle:after {
content: "."";
}

This worked...in Firefox...but I presume it isn't supported by other
browsers?  I was trying to replicate something like what LaTeX's bibtex
does (or even Endnote).  But, perhaps Rincewind has a better
idea...that is to use php.  Perhaps keeping my bibliography entries in
a flat file and letting php loop through it might be a better idea...

Thank you for your help!

Ray