Question - What are pseudo-elements?

Answer - Pseudo-elements are fictional elements that do not exist in HTML. They address the element's sub-part (non-existent in HTML) and not the element itself. In CSS1 there are two pseudo-elements: 'first-line pseudo-element' and 'first-letter pseudo-element'. They can be attached to block-level elements (e.g. paragraphs or headings) to allow typographical styling of their sub-parts. Pseudo-element is created by a colon followed by pseudo-element's name, e.g: P:first-line H1:first-letter and can be combined with normal classes; e.g: P.initial:first-line First-line pseudo-element allows sub-parting the element's first line and attaching specific style exclusively to this sub-part; e.g.: P.initial:first-line {text-transform: uppercase}

The first line of this paragraph will be displayed in uppercase letters

First-letter pseudo-element allows sub-parting the element's first letter and attaching specific style exclusively to this sub-part; e.g.: P.initial:first-letter { font-size: 200%; color: red}

The first letter of this paragraph will be displayed in red and twice as large as the remaining letters

As a developer who works with CSS every day, I find one complication that continues to bother me in my daily work. Support for CSS has always been good on the horizontal scope, but vertical positioning has always been quite complicated. Alone the procedure to affix a footer to the bottom of a screen in dependance of the amount of content is unnecessarily difficult. The old table method provided much easier methods for this. What are your thoughts on this and do you see improvement following in future CSS revisions? Indeed, the CSS formatting model allows more control horizontally than vertically. This is due to (typically) having a known width, but an unknown height. As such, the height is harder to deal with. However, CSS2 fixed positioning allows you to place content relative to the viewport (which is CSS-speak for window) instead of the document. For example, by setting position: fixed; bottom: 0 on an element, it will stick to the