>>your color scheme took over mine, no matter what colors I specified.<<

Welcome to inheritance and the 'cascading' portion of CSS. The cascading order is: Inline > Embedding > Linking. Here's an example that shows order of precedence:

Linked css file named:
yat.css: H3 {font-size: 30pt; Color:red}

HTML:
[LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="yat.css"]

[STYLE TYPE="text/css"]
H3 {Color:blue; text-decoration:underline}
[/STYLE]

[H3 STYLE="color:green"]Welcome to Styles.[/H3]

And here's the result:

Welcome to Styles.

You could have subclassed my 'test' class to over-ride what you wanted to change.

One other note, Rod. The notion of a 'message' in these forums is just a higer level abstraction in relation to the page itself. The browser sees HTML and other things of which its aware, like CSS - but it has no knowledge of and does not act upon what we know as a 'message'. Unless coded to act otherwise, there is no discreteness between what is coded in one message versus another - its all just big glob of HTML and follows HTML rules. For example, once someone creates a class, it can be used throughout the page by anyone who knows its attributes. So you could take my ".help" class - used in my prior message to create the white-on-blue text - and use that in a subsequent message to do the same thing.

Another example is italicized text. See Art's sig in the message following this one. That comes from the code:

I {Color:blue; text-decoration:underline}
which I originally used in the demonstration of cascading. Ya gotta be careful of the impact you have on others - thats why its critical to localize styles to specific tags you use. I switched the tag from 'I' (italics) to 'H3' (Header3) to elminate the problem.

I think now, the various links are working in my example above. Problems stemmed from my trying to ignore the UBB parser - and that never works. :-)

Rgds,
__
/im
[This message has been edited by JTimothyA (edited 11-09-99).]