Mike wrote:
Johannes Koch <ko**@w3development.de> wrote in message
news:<bh*************@ID-61067.news.uni-berlin.de>...
[snip]
<http://www.wisc.edu/uwcc/farmercoops03/fc03.css> is sent as text/plain,
must be text/css.
Johannes,
I have contacted my site administrators and asked them to look into
this potential mis-configuration and correct it if it is indeed
mis-configured. I would very much appreciated a brief tutorial on how
you diagnosed this problem.
The problem occurs at the HTTP level. When a web server responds to a
browser request, it includes a few headers that include information about
the resource, the state of the server, and so on. One of these headers is
Content-Type. This header tells the browser (the client) what type of
resource is being sent back - unlike in some environments, file extensions
are irrelevant to HTTP.
In your case, you want your server to say that your stylesheets are of type
text/css. This media type is defined by RFC 2318 [1]. However, your
server is actually claiming that your stylesheets are of the media type
text/plain.
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer ignores a mandatory requirement of the HTTP
specification [2], and so you see effects like the one you describe - where
it ignores what the server is telling it.
You can diagnose this problem by examining the HTTP headers. A handy way of
doing this is to install the Live HTTP Headers extension [3] to Mozilla /
Phoenix / Netscape, and right-click on the page, selecting "View Page
Info", and the Headers tab. You want to look at the Response headers, in
particular, the Content-Type header. Remember, it tells you the
content-type of the resource you are looking at - so you'll have to visit
the stylesheet URL, not the HTML URL.
PS: There's no need to upload a whole site when trying to track down a
problem. Narrowing it down to the simplest possible test case often leads
you straight to the problem, and when it doesn't, there's no problem in
publishing it for others to see.
[1] <URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2318.txt>
[2] <URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt>
[3] <URL:http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/>
--
Jim Dabell
