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Information

My recent 'sliding-doors' examples have led me into looking at the :first-letter pseudo-element as a method of holding a second background image using just a the link text.

I thought that I should document my findings for anyone else who wishes to persue this for their own purposes.

The above demonstration shows how the first letter can be styled using the available properties as listed below.

• font properties
• color properties 
• background properties
• margin properties
• padding properties
• border properties
• text-decoration
• vertical-align (only if 'float' is 'none')
• text-transform
• line-height
• float
• clear

I believe that Opera, Netscape and Mozilla get all of these right. Firefox get the padding, background image position and the underline wrong. BUT IE5, IE6 and even IE7 gets this very wrong.

In IE the underscore goes through the letter, the padding and margins are wrong, the vertical-align and :hover are not styled, the background image is wrongly positioned, but worst of all the border widths are wrongly displayed. The widths should increase clockwise around the first-letter, but IE reverses this and the borders increase in an anti-clockwise direction. The color order, however, is correct.

THE GOOD

Opera - as I would expect

Safari - underline narrow

Mozilla - negative margins

Netscape - negative margins

Firefox linux - padding and height

THE BAD

Firefox - padding, margin, height, background image and underline

and THE UGLY

IE 5.01 - no styling

IE 5.5 - padding, margins, background image, border-width, narrow underline

IE 6 - padding, margin, border-width, narrow underline, font colors (no :hover)

IE 7 - padding, margin, vertical-align, border-width and narrow underline

Copyright

You may use this method on your personal 'non-profit' web site without seeking my permission. A link back to CSSplay is always appreciated.

Commercial usage is also permitted without seeking approval, but I would ask that a donation is considered to support my work on CSSPlay.

If you are having problems integrating any of my demonstrations into your website then I now offer a service to fault find and correct any errors that you may have introduced. Please email me for more information.