Firefox insists on ?ignoring most of my CSS

[John W. Hall]

I'm just getting into XHTML & CSS. This early test page
http://www3.telus.net/public/wexsess...st/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 <ww**************@telus.net>
Cochrane, Alberta, Canada.
"Helping People Prosper in the Information Age"

[Alan J. Flavell]

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

http://www3.telus.net/public/wexsess...st/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]

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]

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

(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).

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.