Caution - CSS rockie here....

I have a Left Pane that has a dark background and a content pane with a white background.  I need to set the Normal Class to a White (or light) color in a container I will use for the Left Pane only.  However,  I seem to have a problem getting the Link module to work using the dark background container as it sets the class of the link to Normal.  So how can I do something like "set the normal class color when within a DIV of class Darkbackground"   I also need to set the <a> tags attributes for visited, hover etc.

Any pointers or suggestions would be helpful.   Thanks in advance.  /Paul

Paul, here's how I do it:
Let's assume we are making the dark-background container for the left pane, it could be named "LeftContainer.ascx".
Set the whole container's class first, using something like <div class="darkBackground"> or similar if you are using table layout method.
And in the CSS file, declare your container style:
.darkBackground{
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
background: #000000 none;
}
Then style the major DNN text classes to inherit:
.darkBackground .Head, .darkBackground .Normal, .darkBackground .NormalBold {
color: #ffffff;
}
And the container will be black with white text for the title and normal text. You'll need to include a few other DNN text class, though in order to get everything: there's .SubHead, .SubSubHead and more.

Hope this gets you going in the right direction, if you need more just ask.

Yes, it will.  .Darkbackground .normal {} selects the normal class when used within the Darkbackground class, but Darkbackground.normal{} is a whole new class in itself.