I love CSS. I would like to use CSS menus. I have seen several versions on the netover the last 12months (I currently use a javascript menu system). My biggest problem with these CSS menus is that you have to put the menu code into each HTML page as far as I can see). This means a menu change for a site must be updated in every page.

This seems to go against the idea that CSS can be used to change the look and feel of an entire web site by just chnaging the external style sheet. Do you know of a way of putting CSS menus information in an external file that can be linked or imported into the HTML?

I received this email from a younger reader: "Dave, thanks for your cool book Cool Web Sites, but I still need a bit of help. I want to have a little box on my page that shows the person the current date, like you'd see on a day-a-page calendar. I figure you can do that in CSS and Javascript, but I can't figure it out. Can ya help me?"

"Dave, I've been having great results using the hover attribute within my CSS style sheets, but when I have graphical buttons, sometimes they end up with the background-color change hover attribute as a small drop-shadow that only appears when the mouse is over the element. Y'know what I mean? How do I disable this?"

A funny email message arrived: " The other day, I was working on a site when I stumbled across a forgotten corner of HTML. The <dl> tag is a "definition list"; it uses alternating <dt> ("definition term") and <dd> ("definition definition", it seems) child elements. This sort of markup fits pretty well for, say, dates and news items, so I've used it for that.

"My question for you is, what are your favorite obscure tags? I'm not talking about <img> or <br> -- I'm talking about the ones everybody's forgotten about, like the <dl> tag. Other bits of obscurity (like weird CSS selectors) are welcome too, of course. :^)"

While going through my book Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML and CSS for a class I was teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I realized that a gremlin crawled into the page proofs and somehow I ended up with IE-specific DOM reference code to show how CSS and Javascript can interrelate, rather than the approved standards-based approach.

A reader writes:

" On page 62 of Creating Cool HTML 4 Web Sites, the first line of code (<link type="text/css" href="mystyles.css" /> does not seem to work until I add 'rel=stylesheet'. I've tried it out on both IE 6.0 and Netscape 7.x."

I've been beating my head against the wall (proverbially, at least) with what should be a simple CSS style issue: I want to change the color and style of some text links on a Web page. I've been trying this:

<style type="text/css">
.bl              { color: #000; font-weight:900 }
.bl a:link       { color: #0f0; }
.bl a:visited    { color: #00f; }
.bl a:hover      { color: #000; background-color: #ff6 }
</style>

<a href="uses.shtml" class="bl">Google Adwords and Overture</a>

but it wasn't working.

The big day is Monday. The day you get to show off what you know about Dynamic HTML. The problem is, you're not really up to speed. Maybe it's been a while since you worked with JavaScript or cascading style sheets. Or maybe you just like a challenge!