My site is ignoring my external stylesheet...

[mtmama]

Hi everyone,

I'm having a problem with my external stylesheet. My site is ignoring it completely. I only have a few rules (without line separators..):
-------------
p { font-family: 'arial', serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 13pt }

td.one { background: url(images/boxback.gif) repeat-x top left; }

a.test:link { text-decoration: none; color: #9C4501; }
a.test:visited { text-decoration: none; color: #5B5C96; }
a.test:hover { text-decoration: underline; color: #6F3303; }
a.test:active { text-decoration: underline; color: #6F3303; }
----------------------
And my link, placed in the head of the site doc, looks like this:

<LINK REL="stylesheet" HREF="styles/main.css" TYPE="text/css">

I've uploaded in ascii. Everything is in the right directories and I'm not viewing through my programs -- pages are on the server.

I'm baffled. Can someone tell me if I am missing something?

Thanks,
Jessica

[PhraSEOlogy]

Did you try an absolute URL

<LINK REL="stylesheet" HREF="http://www.mydomain.com/styles/main.css" TYPE="text/css">

[maccas]

Are you pages linking to the css file in a folder? if so just change it to

<LINK REL="stylesheet" HREF="/styles/main.css" TYPE="text/css">

also you are missing a ; in p

[mtmama]

Tried the absolute URL (that was my first troubleshooting excercise)...nada.

Fixed the semicolon exclusion (oops..) but didn't add another slash, as I have a base href in the head that has the slash after the .com.

Thanks for the suggestions, tho.

Would it have anything to do with a back-end server setting? This is a new hosting account.

Also, should point out that I can get all of these styles to work when I embed them in the head tag. Don't want to have to do that.

Any more thoughts?
Jessica

[mtmama]

For now, I have moved the stylesheet to the main public directory, removed the subdirectory path in the link, and it is working.

I really like to have my style sheets in another directory (for organizational purposes), so I'd still love to hear thoughts on this issue.

Thanks again,
Jessica

[Marcia]

I always like them in an includes folder, and this week had one that would not be recognized no matter what. I had to leave the styles on the pages themselves.

[victor]

I keep my css files (plural) in a separate /css folder and this has not given me the problem you have had.

When I have seen that problem it's been:

CSS files in cgi-bin folder -- which is not publicly readable

CSS files in a folder with the wrong file permissions (on either the folder or the file) so again, not publicly readable

need to flush the brower cache -- no matter how many changes you make to the CSS, the browser is still using the copy it downloaded yesterday.