just wanted to let you know, that I’ve been using Tripoli already very successful in two projects and it has been speeding up my work a lot/making my life hell a lot easier.
Thanks man—I owe you one!

I have a comment about line height. I often like to get line height consistent across different types of elements to keep a regular vertical rhythm. So if line-height is 18px then it is nice to have it 18px for both h2 and p, for example. I notice in your base CSS file you end up with a line height of 19.2px for paragraphs but 18px for h2 (for example).

I’ve found it quite good to set line-height separately for all elements like this:

.content { line-height: 1.8em; }

But then set font sizes separately on individual element types. Of course you have to be careful setting margins to make them proportional.

A forum would be great. Go for it!

In its simplicity and goals, Tripoli is an ambitious project that deserves to keep being developed and spread as an option for website rendering, particularly (but not exclusive) for online documentation :)

May I suggest a forum flavor? FluxBB, the recently forked version of PunBB.
In fact, it could be a nice experiment to apply Tripoli to FluxBB and see how it looks :D

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Why did the the print stylesheet have been removed?

Because it contained only two CSS lines. I’ve been working on print styles for some projects, and getting browser consistency is very difficult. And each project requires different print style priorities, so I simply removed them for this release since it didn’t really contain much CSS anyway.

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Why not move MSIE5/OSX hacks to base.ie

- because it would require one extra CSS rule to do so. Still, it’s not a bad idea for clarity so I’ll consider it.

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Why not move the anchor rules to the base stylesheet?

- the anchor styles are moved to a presentational plugin called visual. The base does not contain colors at all.

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Why is abbr being transformed to uppercase?

Thats a good question. Abbrevations does not have a general style guide, and magazines print them differently. I’m not really sure why they should be uppercase in the CSS unless it’s because we want some typographic consistency. The uppercase declarations should be set in the type plugin anyway, so thanks for the pointer.

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Why not use:

* html .content blockquote * { margin:.8em 0; }
* html .content blockquote * * { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom:0; }

instead of:

* html .content blockquote * { margin:.8em 0; }

That would ruin the vertical flow inside the blockquote. You cannot just remove margins on descentant children of the blockquote, especially not using such specific rule. The “fake child-selector” is very bad practice, since it also removes properties from elements defined earlier in the cascade if they happen to be a second descendant. IF you could write something like “inherit from grandparent” it would work, but CSS can’t do that.

Basically all block-level elements in tripoli have a bottom-margin of 1.6em. But since IE6 has some limited selectors to choose from, we can set the margin to .8em 0 inside blockquotes instead. The elements will still line up in the same way, but we get the same margins from the blockquote borders.

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Why not use :
.content blockquote { padding-left:2.2em; }

instead of:
blockquote { padding-left:2.2em; }

Another good question, I’ll consider that.

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.content fieldset { padding-top: 0; }
in the IE styles is creating cross-browser inconsistencies.

Actually it’s the opposite, that rule makes the browsers much more consistent, unless I missed something completely. It’s kind of hard to explain, but these three rules inside the IE styles work together to solve the difficult fieldset/legend rendering issues in different browsers:

.content legend{margin-bottom:1.6em;}
.content fieldset{padding-top:0;}
.content legend:first-child{margin-top:0;}

But you are raising an important point. Tripoli recommends HTML and in valid HTML, every fieldset requires a legend. But the definition of fieldset in XHTML is quite loose. If you use a fieldset and no legend, tripoli will render IE and FF differently. This is the cost of effective cross-browser consistency when writing valid HTML. But I strongly recommend to have a legend for every fieldset, so I’ll leave it like this for now but it might change in thenext version.