David Scotson

You don't really need both odd and even identified by a class. Each data table should itself be identified e.g. id="course-student-table" which means the 'normal' row can be targetted without a class.

#user-table tr { }

#user-table tr.row-odd { }

This can reduce repetition in your CSS if you have both striped and non-striped tables and it lets you set styles that apply to both odd and even rows (font-size etc.) only once, only having to override the values that change (usually just background color).

Actually, I've changed my mind on this, having both has no real downside (except an extra 7 characters per table row) and allows different people to approach the same problem from different directions so why not?

I think the original question refers to the striped effect used for tables of data in Mac OS X applications like iTunes:

This makes it easier to read tabular information by following the stripes along horizontally.

In PHP code you generally assign a class (e.g. "odd-row") to every second <tr> tag as you loop through the code producing the table. This should only be used in a table used for tablular data e.g. lists of users and not for tables used purely for positioning.

You can also achieve the same effect in javascript if you are dealing with static HTML or have no access to the server-side code.

There's a long answer and a short answer to this question, the short answer being that it should just work.

If it's not working then more info is needed in order to provide the long answer that's appropriate e.g.

• are you familiar with CSS and its various font properties?
• have you succedeed in making any other changes to styles.php? Changing the color or typeface of text, or background patterns, for example.
• is it the font-size in one particular section of the site your changing or everywhere

Yes, in order for Google to index your site it needs access and then any member of the public can read your content on Google.

However they do sell a Google-in-a-box search appliance for intranets that could probably be hooked up in a similar manner. A new cut-down version was just introduced at a cost of only $5,000 (maybe they do an educational discount too. edit: I just checked, they don't ).

http://www.google.com/enterprise/

The equivalent open source solution for institutions is probably to have a separate Java machine running a Lucene (using one of the PHP based interfaces for more control) or perhaps Nutch (which would spider the entire web interface just like Google)-based search engine and hooking it up in the same way as Google. However these solutions are probably useless in standard hosting situations.

Unfortunately PHP's Unicode-issues seem to have left it behind the state-of-the-art in search technology so SQL based searches are probably the best you can hope for at the moment in a pure PHP environment.

The HTML editor works on Firefox (and I assume Mozilla) for Mac OS X. I'm not sure if Mozilla for OS 9 will work.

Internet Explorer 5.2 and the latest release of Safari don't support any of the standard HTML editing widgets, though apparently the version of Safari included with the next version of OS X (codename Tiger and due out by the middle of the year) will support them.