Scripsit jjamjim@yahoo.com:

> I have a problem with styles not being inherited into form elements
> such as textarea and input.

Korpela's 1st law of CSS misunderstanding: any question containing the
word "inherit" or its derivative is based on a deep misunderstanding of
inheritance, cascade, and something else.

> <span class="myclass"><textarea>txt</textarea></span>

Why the pointless <span>, why the invalid <textarea> markup, and where's
the URL?

> So if "myclass" specifies "color:blue"

Then it's clueless. Write 100 times: blue means link. Then stop using
color: blue even in examples, since it's a _bad_ example.

> I would expect the text in the
> textarea to be blue.

That's because you don't understand inheritance.

> But it isn't - at least not in the browsers I
> have tried (firefox, opera, ie).

So what? If they have a browser style sheet that sets textarea color to
pink (or something else), textarea won't possibly _inherit_ color.

> I've had a good look
> through the css specification, but couldn't find anything about
> elements not inheriting styles.

Where did you read about elements inheriting styles?

They don't. An element _may_ inherit a value for a _property_, but only
if absolutely _no_ style sheet being applied sets that property for that
element.

> I have tried duplicating the class on the form element:
>
> <span class="myclass"><textarea class="myclass">txt</textarea></span>

What's the point of the <span>?

> That's better, but relative size properties cause problems. If
> "myclass" has font-size:200%. The textarea font would actually turn
> out 4 times the size.

Of course. When you set font size in %, you need to consider the effects
of nesting.

> So are the browsers incorrectly implementing the spec?

Yes, but that's not important right now.

> Or am I missing something.

Yes.

If you want to set the color of an element, set it, instead of setting
the color of an enclosing element.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/