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Sets or retrieves generated content to insert before or after an element.

Syntax

HTML	{ content : sContent }
Scripting	[ sContent = ] object.style.content [ = v ]

Possible Values

sContent

String that specifies or receives a space-delimited list, including one or more of the following values. string Text content, in either double quotation marks (") or single quotation marks ('). counter(sCounter,[listStyle]) Possible values include the following: sCounter A counter identifier, optionally followed by listStyle. listStyle Optional. Any of the range of values from the listStyleType property.

The property is read/write for all objects except the following, for which it is read-only: currentStyle. The property has no default value. The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) attribute is not inherited.

Remarks

The content attribute is used in conjunction with :before and :after pseudo-classes to generate content in a document.

Strings can written with either double quotation marks (") or with single quotation marks ('). Double quotation marks cannot occur inside other double quotation marks, unless they are preceded by a backslash (\) escape character. For example, the string "\"" is interpreted as containing one double quotation character.

It is possible to break strings over several lines, for esthetic or other reasons, by use of the backslash as a continuation character; however, the newline character itself is ignored. Authors may include line breaks in the generated content by writing the \A escape sequence in any of the strings after the content property. The generated line break is displayed in accordance with the value of the white-space attribute.

The backslash is also used to generate escape characters that cannot be represented in the current character encoding. In this case, the backslash is followed by at most six hexadecimal digits (from the range 0–9 and A–F) to indicate the Unicode character with that number.

This property requires Internet Explorer to be in IE8 mode rendering.

Example

The following example generates braces before and after all the H1 elements on a page.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

<style type="text/css">
H1:before {
    content: "{ ";
}
H1:after {
	content: " }";
}
</style>

Standards Information

This property is defined in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS2.1) .

Applies To

currentStyle, runtimeStyle, style, A, ABBR, ADDRESS, B, BIG, BLOCKQUOTE, BODY, BUTTON, CAPTION, CENTER, CITE, CODE, COL, COLGROUP, DD, DFN, DIR, DIV, DL, DT, EM, FIELDSET, FORM, hn, HTML, I, IMG, INPUT type=button, INPUT type=checkbox, INPUT type=file, INPUT type=image, INPUT type=password, INPUT type=radio, INPUT type=reset, INPUT type=submit, INPUT type=text, KBD, LABEL, LEGEND, LI, LISTING, MARQUEE, MENU, NOBR, OL, P, PRE, S, SAMP, SMALL, SPAN, STRIKE, STRONG, SUB, SUP, TABLE, TBODY, TD, TEXTAREA, TFOOT, TH, THEAD, TR, TT, U, UL, VAR, XMP

See Also

counterIncrement, counterReset