Why won't Mac IE request stylesheet?

[rayvd]

A user of my site who is running MSIE 5.22 on a Mac PowerPC (I think he's running OSX if it matters) is having trouble displaying my site properly. I've checked the logs, and it appears that his browser is _not_ requesting the stylesheet! Here's the excerpt from the logs:

208.xxx.xx.xx - - [14/May/2003:10:25:30 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 45026 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.22; Mac_PowerPC)"
208.xxx.xx.xx - - [14/May/2003:10:25:31 -0700] "GET /control.php HTTP/1.0" 200 32829 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.22; Mac_PowerPC)"
208.xxx.xx.xx - - [14/May/2003:10:25:31 -0700] "GET /board.php HTTP/1.0" 200 12178 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.22; Mac_PowerPC)"

Here's what a "normal" request looks like...

172.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [14/May/2003:11:12:50 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 4339 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95; AT&T CSM 6)"
172.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [14/May/2003:11:12:55 -0700] "GET /board.php HTTP/1.1" 200 3968 "http://referreredited" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95; AT&T CSM 6)"
172.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [14/May/2003:11:12:56 -0700] "GET /control.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2489 "http://referreredited" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95; AT&T CSM 6)"
172.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [14/May/2003:11:13:00 -0700] "GET /styles/default.css HTTP/1.1" 200 1976 "http://referreredited/board.php" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95; AT&T CSM 6)"

I also notice his browser is claiming HTTP/1.0 ... I wonder if this could be a problem? I am using the following line to pull in the stylesheet into my HTML:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://domain_name/styles/base.css">

I put the complete absolute URL after reading some posts suggesting that Mac IE might have problems with the CSS if you did it any other way. Still no go with this guy. The odd thing is is that it seems to work fine with the OSX boxes running IE that we have here...

Any ideas? I imagine if I made the CSS inline it would solve his problem, but I would rather leave things external if possible.

[drbrain]

What headers get sent with the stylesheet by the server? Perhaps MacIE has it cached and knows that its not out-of-date yet.

(In case you didn't know, use telnet hostname 80 to find out)

[Macguru]

>>Still no go with this guy. The odd thing is is that it seems to work fine with the OSX boxes running IE that we have here...

Maybe his preferences are set not to use stylesheets?

[rayvd]

[arthur:~] % telnet hostname 80
Trying ip_addy...
Connected to hostname.
Escape character is '^]'.

GET /styles/base.css HTTP/1.0
Host: hostname
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 20:14:23 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.3.1 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a AuthMySQL/2.20 mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
Last-Modified: Fri, 09 May 2003 00:01:43 GMT
ETag: "33e60a-622-3ebaefe7"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1570
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/css

No cache stuff is being sent, but if it were being cached, I'd think that perhaps there would still be a GET request, and I'd see it in my logs as a 302 result code?

Perhaps he does have stylesheets turned off. That would be silly :) I'll have to check on that.