How do you style comments after they are pulled out of a database?

Question

On my website you can post a comment, but I am unsure how to style them using CSS. I remember reading something about using ul and li tags but I can't figure it out. I want each individual comment to have a border, background color, etc. Here is the PHP:

$query = "SELECT * FROM catharsis";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$num = mysql_numrows($result);

mysql_close();
echo "<h4><center>Let it out.</center></h4>";

$i = 0;
while ($i < $num) {
    $name = mysql_result($result,$num - $i,"message");
    echo "$name<br>";
    $i++;
}

What I'm trying to figure out is how to code this so that I can give a class to the echo "$name<br>"; and therefore style my comments with CSS.

Answer 1

Do:

echo '<ul class="comments">';

for($i = 0; $i < $num; $i++) {
    $name = mysql_result($result,$num - $i,"message");
    echo "<li>$name</li>";
}

echo '</ul>';

Then you can style it with this CSS:

ul.comments li {
 // style goes here
}

You'll probably want to re-style ul.comments too, since I doubt you want the default.

Alternately, you could do just <ul> and make each <li> into <li class="comment">

Answer 2

you would need to style both the <UL> and <LI> elements in CSS. When you echo them out, you would start with an unordered (bullet) list <UL> and each new comment would be <LI>My nifty comment</LI>. You can style the UL so that it has no bullets using

list-style-type: none;