I'm working on a webapp, and every so often we run into situations where pages will load without applying CSS. This problem has shown up in IE6, IE7, Safari 3, and FF3.
A page refresh will always fix the problem.
There are 3 CSS files loaded, all within the same style block using #import:
<STYLE type="text/css">
#import url([base css file]);
#import url([skin css file]);
#import url([generated css path]);
</STYLE>
In any situation when we take the time to examine the html source, nothing is out of the ordinary. Access logs seem normal as well - we're getting HTTP 304 responses for the static CSS files whenever they are requested, and an HTTP 200 response for our generated CSS.
The mimetype is text/css for the css files and the generated css. We're using an iPlanet server, which forwards requests to a Tomcat server.
davebug asked:
Is it always the same css file not loading, or is the problem with all of them, evenly?
None of the CSS files load. Any styles defined within the HTML work fine, but nothing in any of the CSS files works when this happens.
I've had a similar thing happen that I was able to fix by including a base style sheet first using the "link rel" method rather than "#import". i.e. move your [base css file] inclusion to:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="[base css file]" type="text/css" media="screen" />
and put it before the others.
if it happens often enough that you're able to see it in your browser, try intalling the Live http headers Firefox extension or the Tamper Data extension, and watch the response headers as they are seen by the browser.
I don't know why, but in my case if the page is loaded from an action with the path like /ActionName, I see this problem.
But if I change it (for example) to /reservedArea/ActionName or /aPath/ActionName it works :/
It's crazy...
Examining the headers is a good idea, but I imagine all you will learn from them is that the server didn't respond to a request every once in a while.
I see this happen all the time on the net. Images won't load until you refresh, css is messed up, etc. All of the situations are solved by a refresh.
I imagine one way you could "fix" this, maybe, is by specifying in your cs file a url for an image for some element. Then, on page load in javascript, get that element and see if that image has loaded. If not, then have the page reload itself.
Seems pretty exotic, but that's the only idea I had...
Use ab or httperf or curl or something to repeatedly load the CSS files from the webserver. Perhaps it's not consistently serving the pages.
Related
https://friends-with-you.myshopify.com/
I'm trying to develop my first shopify theme. I'm trying to load a stylesheet which is hosted on another server, but the CSS is not loading. If I copy and paste that CSS directly into a file in the shopify theme, it works.
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://fwy.pagodabox.com/magic/themes/fwy/fwy.css" />
What am I doing wrong at the above URL, and why isn't the css loading?
thanks!
Can you load your CSS file over both http and https? If so, change your tag to look like this:
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="//fwy.pagodabox.com/magic/themes/fwy/fwy.css" />
That way whether a user visits using http://yourstore.com or https://yourstore.com, they'll get the stylesheet served using the protocol they're on (and you won't get any mixed content warnings).
A little more background: http://paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
Under IE7 and IE8, using this in a <link> tag will result in your content being fetched twice.
Change your link tag to use a secure URL:
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="https://fwy.pagodabox.com/magic/themes/fwy/fwy.css" />
^
The URL you're using now works fine on its own, but since you're browsing to the Shopify store over SSL, many web browsers are going to be hesitant to load the CSS over an unsecured connection.
I just checked and pagodabox serves the CSS file just fine over SSL.
In normal HTML documents one can load stylesheets from anywhere, as long as they exist and you're able to load them by typing the URL in (which I can).
I see the page as two navigation bars with a logo on the left hand side. There are hover states with transitions to a colour background on each item. Although, when I loaded the page, Chrome warned me not to load supposedly insecure content. Before this is loaded I just see text in Times New Roman. I think this is you problem.
I use themes with WordPress and style-sheets come with them (mostly). I don't see why you couldn't just put the style-sheet in with the rest of the theme.
Overall, the answer is yes (normally) but in this case browsers may regard it as un-safe and therefore not load it.
Yes you can! But it is faster to host the stylesheet on your server/where the other files reside. If you plan to include a stylesheet from elsewhere, you could run into problems of that server being down/busy and hence your theme will not display as required. As #Blieque mentioned, some browsers may question external content causing unnecessary warning popups to a user/user-agent.
For some reason I can't get the new css to be used in firefox or ie's browser.
I am using php to consolidate all the css into one file, then output it like so:
PHP file:
header('Content-type: text/css');
readfile('layout.css');
readfile('a.css'); //jqueryUI
Here's how I call it from the HTML side:
<link rel='stylesheet' href='stylesheet/css.php?v=1327523109' type='text/css' />
The "v" querystring parameter is simply a php time() function from a tip I got on another search for the problem. Hoping the time() would trick the browser into not loading the cache version, but it is not working and still loading the old css.
When I look in firebug's css file it shows the old css file. However if I directly access the .css page through the url, the output to the browser screen shows all the new css code.
if I render the same page in the chrome browser it shows the new css without any problem...but ie and ff show the old css.
I don't understand what's going on and how to fix it. Can anyone help me?
ctrl + shift + del In both browser will allow you to clear your cache, cookies, temp files, and more via nice checkboxes.
Perhaps the css file is cached in the browser. Try CTRL+F5. If that doesn't work try clearing the cache, if that doesn't work try a reboot. :D
I tried CTRL+F5, Clearing the cache, rebooting...none of that worked right. Then I decided to change the ordering inside the css.php file for the readfile() functions. Once I moved the ordering around it triggered the new css to load. I don't know exactly why this worked, but now the new css loaded.
Decided to answer this here in case someone else comes accross a similar problem and the traditional cache clearing doesn't fix it.
Here is the trick, instead version, just use the PHP filemtime() Function to show your last modified file.
<link rel='stylesheet' href='stylesheet/css.php?<?php filemtime('stylesheet/css.php'?>' type='text/css' />
So every time you modified CSS file, the browser will know what file must be loaded.
hope it help..
When I make a page, link it to a CSS file, and open it in a browser, it works fine.
But if a make a change and refresh the page again between very short time periods, the change is not reflected. But after sometime, when i refresh the page again, the changes appear.
So, somehow the browser keeps the CSS file cached and expires it after sometime. How to make the browser cache no CSS or HTML file.
It would be better if i can block it on a particular domain.
I'm on Ubuntu, using Chrome and Firefox, trying to prevent browsers from caching CSS files on 'localhost'... How to do it...
Thanks...
Something as simple as this should work:
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen.css?v={CURRENT_TIMESTAMP}">
Just replace {CURRENT_TIMESTAMP} with the actual timestamp in your server side code. This makes the browser think it's a new file because of the query string and it will be downloaded again. You could also use the actual modification time of the file (filemtime('/path/to/css/screen.css') if you're using PHP) which should prevent unnecessary downloads.
You can open Developer Tools by pressing Ctrl+Shift+J and then you'll find a cog icon in bottom right. When you click on it you should see an option to disable caching.
It would help to know how the website is hosted, as you can configure this in most web servers.
Also, it's a good idea to introduce a cache busting mechanism which would modify the links to the CSS files in question when you change the CSS files' contents. Browsers would then reload the CSS file because the HTML refers to a different URL.
A good example of a cache busting mechanism is the ruby on rails 3.1 asset pipeline which also minifies files and gzips them if the browser supports them:
Rails 3 - Asset Pipeline -- What does it mean to me?
http://2beards.net/2011/11/the-rails-3-asset-pipeline-in-about-5-minutes/
The seemingly-inelegant but rock solid approach is to give the asset a new name, when the content changes. This solves the problem for all your users, not just you:
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen_034.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen_035.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen_036.css">
Or maybe (but it's more of a pain to change in an IDE, and sometimes causes unrelated problems with caching):
<link rel="stylesheet" src="/css/screen.css?pretend_version_number=034">
Nothing else works quite as well in large scale production environments, where millions of copies of an older css file may be sitting in various intermediate or browser caches. Some clients ignore cache control headers, and you don't really want caching subverted anyway, at least not in production.
In development you can press Ctrl+Shift+J (Chrome) and turn off caching.
the font of the content of my facebook app keeps getting italicized even when i've removed the italics from the css file. if i make minor changes in the css file and upload it to the server, the firebug shows the unedited previous css file and hence, the app keeps showing unformatted content. what exactly is going wrong here?
i made a new css file and copied the contents of the previous css exactly as it was, and i linked it in all the files which require css. but when i upload these files to the server, facebook canvas doesn't show any css at all. i replaced the css filename with the previous one, and it works. why is this?
Actually it looks like facebook is currently experiencing some weird problems with styling. It doesn't cache any new styles, only displays what was previously cached (from yesterday). If you provide a new stylesheet url it will not be able to pull it up (like that url doesn't exist).
During normal conditions what others already suggested should work.
Facebook does like to cache things. Persistently. I don't know why the new file wouldn't have worked, by I can recommend 'spoofing' your css filename with a spurious querystring variable, and incrementing it each time you make an update.
eg
href="my_css_file.css?x=1"
Sounds like the browser is caching your CSS file, which is why even Firebug sees the older version.
There are numerous ways you can prevent the browser from caching your CSS file during development (once in production mode, you probably want it to remain in the cache). The most common technique used by web frameworks like Ruby on Rails is to append a random query string to the URL, like so:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css?96234987" />
...but the trick is that it should be different every time, so the browser thinks it's a different file.
Here are links to a simple trick for PHP, a JSP example, and other possible methods.
According to Include files on facebook developer wiki:
Stylesheet includes are cached automatically by Facebook. Just include a tag like:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"
href="http://yourapp.com/stylesheets/style.css?v=1.0" />
Increment the version number upon each change to your style sheet, as specified above.
The web dev toolbar for Firefox is quite an impressive tool.
What I am completely clueless about is how does this tool get the css stylesheet file of a site? This is hosted on a host which is secure etc. I am completely stumped.
I must be thinking about this in all the wrong way.
Thanks
The client (in this case Firefox) has to download the CSS file in order to render the page correctly. The plugin (in this case Firebug) simply requests the proper URL and the browser it gets it--most likely from the cache. There is no real mystery here.
In every HTML file, there's a link to the CSS stylesheet, or else the browser wouldn't know where to find it, thus losing the ability to render the page correctly.
It's in the form of <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="theme.css">,
I'd like to add that regardless of whether the host is 'secure' or not, it still is presenting the file to the client.
Unless, of course, you're looking at a XML file. Then you need to consult the XSL which'll tell you where the stylesheet is.