Firefox & text/css

[Greg Rundlett]

Jonathan Linowes wrote:

Not exactly on topic, but I know the group will forgive me for wanting 
to help, and probably some will even be interested to hear about the issue.

> Hi,
>
> I just learned that some of my sites don't display properly with the 
> FireFox browser, and the reason is
>
> Error: The stylesheet http://www.naturalentrepreneur.com/nenh.css was 
> not loaded because its MIME type, "text/plain", is not "text/css".
>
I tested your site using Firefox and Mozilla on Linux, and Mozilla and 
Internet Explorer on Windows 98SE and they all worked without error.  
Firefox is I believe the most standard-compliant browser around, so I 
was curious to hear about this problem.  Indeed it is the fact that 
Firefox *is* standards compliant that reveals a problem with the Apache 
webserver (mis)configuration.

> and I found on several forums that the solution is to add a text/css 
> mime type to the apache config file (other browsers just figure out 
> its a css file).  I tried to find apache doc's how to do it, but I 
> don't know much about Apache, and I don't want to mess it up. Can you 
> help?

Exactly.  Even though I saw no visible error message, the server 
returned faulty HTTP headers.  Here is what you get from your server 
upon requesting the CSS file:
http://www.naturalentrepreneur.com/nenh.css
 
GET /nenh.css HTTP/1.1
Host: www.naturalentrepreneur.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) 
Gecko/20041128 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0-4)
Accept: 
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 

Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
 
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 03:11:36 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) PHP/4.3.9 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510
Last-Modified: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 23:21:03 GMT
Etag: "c4dc5e-881-41ad005f"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 2177
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=20
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/plain

This last line of the HTTP headers indicates that Apache is telling the 
browser that this file is a plain text file.  To have Apache correctly 
specify the mime type, you can edit the mime.types file that controls 
Apache (if you have access to this file...in a hosted environment you 
likely do not).

As root...
find out where yours is located, on my system it is at 
/etc/apache/mime.types
    locate mime.types
edit this file
    vi /etc/mime.types
find the css extension
    /css
if you find a css line entry, it will say: 'text/plain css'  Put your 
cursor on that line and press dd - that is the d key twice, to delete 
the line.
    dd
Now insert a line to correctly associate the file extension with the 
MIME header.   Should be: 'text/css     css'  Press the i key to insert 
at the cursor.
    i
    type 'text/css     css' (without the quotes, and add a carriage return)
Save the file
    :wq
And restart apache.  This command varies by system and version, but 
usually 'apachectl -graceful' will work.
    /usr/sbin/apachectl graceful

Assuming you do NOT have root access to the machine, but you DO have the 
ability to use '.htaccess' files to override the Apache server 
settings...  You want to create a file named '.htaccess' (Yes the 
filename begins with a period, and has no extension.)  You can do this 
with any real text editor.  Dreamweaver should work and it appears that 
your site is built using Dreamweaver.  In that file you want this line:

    AddType text/css    css

Save the file and upload it to your server, putting it in the main 
'Document Root' of your site.  Normally this directory is named 
something like 'public_html' or 'www'.  .htaccess files are read by 
Apache on every request, so you do NOT need to restart your server.

> thanks

You're welcome.