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On certain internet connections I've found with certain sites such as Facebook, the CSS doesn't load. But then on those same connections certain sites such as StackOverflow, the site still works fine.

My question is, why does it act this way? and how can I program in such a way that it loads like StackOverflow?

Depending on the answer to the first question the second question might not be entirely relevant.

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  • this is all because of the internet i think programming makes no difference here Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 5:15
  • 3
    Umm... We have nowhere near enough information in your post to even hazard a guess. You should perhaps start by troubleshooting WHY css doesn't load. We can't read your mind, or psychically debug things. On you have access to that environment to try and track it down. A good tool to use is firebug on firefox. It's like you called up the mechanic and said "my car doesn't work when I drive down elm street, why is that?" He would have no idea. Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 5:18
  • Are you talking about a transient issue that goes away and works fine with you reload? Or that these sites never work on that connection (or at least continue to fail for an extended period of time)? Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 6:16
  • @Snger Presumably StackOverflow. Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 7:03
  • the issue doesn't go away with reload but also is not permanent. A few days later it was fine Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 12:44

3 Answers 3

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The CSS could be being filtered if it is on a CDN by certain router set ups, also the CSS (in the case of facebook) could be being updated and for a split second was unavailable.

Best thing in this case is to update the browser in question do a Ctrl + F5 (Windows, Linux) or Cmd + R (Mac) and force refresh the content and see if the CSS comes down.

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2 Comments

the IT had been messing with their setups over the summer and supposedly refixed something after we got back. it appears like it must have been something like the first part of your answer. but why would certain pages load well while others not?
Depends if where the CSS is hosted, most large sites put their static files such as CSS & JS on Content Delivery Networks (CDN) so they can serve the files quicker to people. If your IT people had made it so the CDN networks weren't loading properly that would affect some sites but not others.
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I've gotten this a lot when browsing sites. And your Facebook example, yes this is a common problem among dynamic webpages. But, the first possible reason would be that the style-sheet doesn't have the right MIME-type, or it isn't set at all. Some browsers won't parse this, all imported/linked/inline style-sheets should have in their tag the attribute 'type' set to 'text/css'. The other reason is that it is the page, sometimes dynamic pages such as pages scripted in PHP are programmed to dynamically link to a specific style-sheet given a certain condition, if things aren't done right the script might never actually load a style-sheet.

If you would like to (only help) ensure that your stylesheet is loaded, make sure that your dynamic script ALWAYS loads a style-sheet, and/or that your style-sheet appears like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="theme.css" />

Or if it is inline

<style type="text/css">
    p {
        margin-left:20px;
    }
    body {
        background-image:url("img_bg.png");
    }
</style>
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3 Comments

I'll have to check this next time the error occurs, but i assumed this was the norm. is there a reason facebook wouldn't be doing either of these?
@TMP I have no clue what goes on with facebook, I've never had stylesheet problems while browsing FB. But i dont feel i can fully answer this because a stylesheet not being loaded could be caused by alot of things. Try different browsers. Facebook probably does well to specify MIME types
yeah i figured, i cant really test it much more now that it's been working fine for a while but i remember firefox didnt work either at the time. if i get more information ill probably comment again or update the question
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In my case, simply updating the page with Ctrl+F5 didn't help, but when I opened developer console of the browser(Chrome in my case) with Ctrl+Shift+I and right-clicked on refresh button and selected "Hard Reload", all the CSS has been loaded successfully.

This might help you too.

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2 Comments

See also stackoverflow.com/questions/20569394
@A-Tech Thank you for the reference.

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