The two major browser options -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer and the Mozilla browsers (Firefox, etc.) have slightly different syntax to access and change CSS style values from scripts. In addition the specification of the CSS properties on the the HTML page and inside scripts is also different.

1. Spelling CSS Properties

   If you are specifying CSS style in a style sheet or locally on an HTML page, the property names have hyphens to separate the property name parts. For example:
           z-index; border-color; font-family; font-size; background-color; ...
   However, when these same properties are referenced inside the script code, the property names are spelled: (1) WITHOUT the hyphens; (2) the first letter of the property is lower case; and (3) the first letter of subsequent words of the property are capitalized. For example:
           zIndex; borderColor; fontFamily; fontSize; backgroundColor;...
   This is because in the script code the hyphen would be interpreted as a "subtraction" operation.

2. DOM CSS References
   
   
   • Scripting in Microsoft IE
     IE uses a collection (i.e., an array) named "all" to store every HTML object that has an "id" specified. So if you have an HTML tag that has a CSS style attribute and you wish to control the properties of the object from script, the tag must have an id -- i.e., <tag id="some_id" style="...Then in the IE script you would reference this tag by:

     document.all.some_id.style.some_css_property = some_value

   • Scripting in Mozilla
     The Mozilla browsers reference CSS properties using "getElementById" So if you have an HTML tag that has a CSS style attribute and you wish to control the properties of the object from script, the tag must have an id -- i.e., <tag id="some_id" style="... Then in the mozilla script you would reference this tag by:

     document.getElementById(some_id).style.some_css_property = some_value

   
   
3. Cross Browser References

   In order to allow your script to work across various browsers you can employ the following test:

   if (document.all)
         document.all.some_id.style.some_css_property = some_value
   else
         document.getElementById(some_id).style.some_css_property = some_value

   ---

     Click a topic in the list to the left to see examples