There are lots of great tutorials already out there for CSS, but I’d like to address one specific problem I’ve encountered with Internet Explorer. Say you’ve defined a style for a custom tag in your CSS stylesheet:

header1 {
color: #F1E1FF;
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 18;
}


…all versions of Internet Explorer will completely ignore it!

To work around this, don’t define styles for custom tags if you can help it. Define styles for classes instead, and apply the classes to standard tags. This is easy to do.

Step 1. In your stylesheet, give your style a name beginning with a period. That turns it into a class:

.header1 {
color: #F1E1FF;
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 18;
}


Step 2. In your HTML file, use a standard tag and apply your class to it. For changing font size and color, the <span> tag is handy:

<span class="header1">foo</span>


That’s all you need to do for applying styles to plain text. But if you’d like to apply your style to a link…you’ve got some extra steps left.

Step 3. Internet Explorer will only read a link’s style information from its <a> tag! This is annoying, because most of the time you’ll already have specified a style for your normal links. You’ll need to override it. Go to your stylesheet, copy the class you just made, and add an a before the period. The copy should otherwise be identical to your original:

a.header1 {
color: #F1E1FF;
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 18;
}


Step 4. You can then add some other variations if you’d like to do something more with your link.

a.header1:hover {
color: #F1E1FF;
text-decoration: underline;
font-size: 18;
}


Step 5. Finally, apply the class to your link:

<a href="foo.html" class="header1">foo</a>


Internet Explorer should now do a better job with your CSS style information. However, be aware that it’s still pretty unpredictable compared to its competitors. You may decide that it’s not worth the time to get your page exactly right for just this browser, even if it does have the largest market share.

OS X Tiger includes a useful new feature: you can now send MIDI between computers over an ordinary network. You don’t need any additional hardware, and the connection appears as just one more ordinary MIDI port available to your applications. It’s a simple and effective way to have multiple laptop performers share control information, or to coordinate multiple computers during a live show.

Before starting this tutorial, you’ll need at least two OS X Tiger Macs that share a network. If you have WiFi, you can follow this tutorial first to create a direct wireless connection, without going through a router. (However you set it up, remember to turn off your firewalls first, or else make sure that they’re not going to interfere.)

Step 1. Find and launch the Audio MIDI Setup utility:

Step 2. Go to the MIDI Devices and open the Network device:

Step 3. To start with, use the following settings:

Step 4. Choose a computer from the list and connect to it:

Step 5. If you’re successful, the computer will now appear in the Participants list. If you can’t connect, your network settings are most likely to blame. (Check to see whether you can do other ordinary network tasks, like copying files from the other computer.)

Note: On some older Macs, closing the Audio MIDI Setup utility appears to break the connection. Try it and see–if you have this problem, you’ll have to keep the utility running to stay connected.

Step 6. If everything has gone smoothly, you’ll have created a new MIDI Port with the name Network (Session 1). Select it from inside a MIDI program and test it out!