Stylesheets - Firefox insists on ?ignoring most of my CSS

Author

Firefox insists on ?ignoring most of my CSS

John W. Hall

2005-12-04, 6:44 pm

I'm just getting into XHTML & CSS. This early test page
http://www3.telus.net/public/wexses...est/fftest.html

displays as expected in IE 6 (which I did not expect) but Firefox
ignores almost all the CSS (which I did not expect).

Both the HTML & CSS validate OK.

I installed the Web Developer Extension in Firefox (V 1.07) and
discovered something interesting:

"Show css" shows that most of the CSS attributes are prefixed with a
'?'. (These are NOT in the css file, of course). What does this mean??

#top {
?_margin: 20px;
?padding: 10px;
?color: #000000;
?background: #dddd00;
?line-height: 100px; /* this does NOT happen in FF, does in IE */
border: solid 5px green;
}

Using Edit css, I delete the '?' prefixes, and the css works as
expected. Reload page causes the '?' to reappear and the css is
ignored again.

Help requested, please.

--
John W Hall <wweexxsseessssaa@telus.net>
Cochrane, Alberta, Canada.
"Helping People Prosper in the Information Age"

Alan J. Flavell

2005-12-04, 6:44 pm

On Sun, 4 Dec 2005, John W. Hall wrote:

> http://www3.telus.net/public/wexses...est/fftest.html
[...]
> Both the HTML & CSS validate OK.

No: your CSS is almost entirely defective, as reported by the
W3C CSS checker.

> "Show css" shows that most of the CSS attributes are prefixed with a
> '?'.

Those are the same illegal characters which are causing the CSS
valdiation failures, presumably.

> (These are NOT in the css file, of course).

What makes you think that? They surely are no mere invention.

They look to me like no-break spaces (x'a0' characters).

Whatever you're using to edit this CSS material is fuxing things up,
it seems.

John W Hall

2005-12-04, 10:29 pm

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

> No: your CSS is almost entirely defective, as reported by the
> W3C CSS checker.

I had validated it a half-hour before posting, it was OK then.
Didn't think I had edited it since.

> Whatever you're using to edit this CSS material is fuxing things up,
> it seems.

That was Textpad. I can see the bad chars in Notepad. Got some exploring
to do.

Many thanks for pointing out my problem, I was going crazy.

Alan J. Flavell

2005-12-04, 10:30 pm

On Sun, 4 Dec 2005, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

>
> What makes you think that? They surely are no mere invention.
>
> They look to me like no-break spaces (x'a0' characters).

Thinking it over some more, I believe that the CSS file (in the
absence of an HTTP charset= attribute) is being treated as utf-8,
where these isolated x'a0' bytes are illegal.