Firefox ignoring style sheets online but not offline

Even though HTML and CSS both validate with W3C

[awdaus]

I have sites that validate for HTML and CSS and display correctly offline in both IE and Firefox but which never display any styling online in Firefox.

There must be a simple reason but I have been unable to find anything about this particular problem after numerous Google searches.

I am aware that some people have this problem because of comments at the top of a CSS document, but I have none of those. And I also know it's not a caching problem.

Could it be a character encoding problem? A link tag problem? Something to do with the web server?

[Span]

Hi awdaus, welcome to the forums!

A bit rusty here, but I think your server doesn't send your CSS with the correct mime-type. It should be text/css.

[penders]

How are you linking to your external stylesheet? Can you paste the code?

Just a couple of ideas... Have you got the 'case' correct? eg. "mystyles.css" and "myStyles.css" could be considered the same when working offline under Windows, but not online under Linux. Are you using '/' (forward slashes) in your directory path, as opposed to '\' (Windows back slashes)? '\' will work under IE, but not FF.

[awdaus]

Right on, Span. I sent your suggestion about the MIME-type recognition to my server administrator and he apologised for neglecting that aspect of his configuration. My sites are now working fine.