Once again, I have something I can't get to work. I understand the CSS Box model, with margin, border, padding, content (starting outside and working in.

I have a page http://www.roberson-family.com/genealogy/names.php where I want the left column items to have headers (Surnames) and a small indent for the individual names under the surnames.

I know I can get what I want by adding a pair of (& n b s p ; )s, and I can get the padding to work with inline css (style="padding-left=10px") but I wanted to use one entry to get everything done. I have every line of code where I want the indent set to be <td class="person"> and I have this style statement:

td.person {
width:33%;
font-size:medium;
text-align:left;
padding-left: 2cm;
}

I have also tried setting the padding using 10px, but had no indent with that.

Is this not what I should be doing with padding?

Hi Bill,

Take a look at this page:
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archi … _wars.html

Your "#alpha td" rule has a higher specificity than "td.person", so the later rule's padding is ignored. Just change "td.person" to "#alpha td.person".

Cary,

Thanks. Just recently, I saw an article about specificity on about.com and saved it for later reading. Guess I should have read it right then. Now that I have the issue with my page solved, I am beginning to understand specificity.

I learn something about web sites every day.