Setting the default style sheet language on your Web site
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
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Karl Dubost
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- Published:
Very often Web creators are using an external style sheet, or a style element to add style information to their html pages. By doing, we specify what is the style language used in the Web page. For example using the `link` element.
<link href="cute.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>But if your page is using the style attribute, the user agent may not know what is the language used for styling. This is a principle of orthogonality. A company could launch a user agent with a new style language and a new mime-type. It will be difficult to impose and ensure interoperability because of the deployment base, but it is still possible.
If you want to set up a default style sheet language for your Web site, there are a few choices. You can use a meta name in each of your page:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"/>
or you can specify an HTTP header:
Content-Style-Type: text/css
With Apache http server 2.0, you can use mod_headers and mod_setenvif in the general configuration file or at a directory level in .htaccess:
SetEnvIf response Content-Type [text/html|application/xhtml+xml] html-content=1
Header add "Content-Style-Type: text/css" env=html-content
PS: mod_headers and mod_setenvif are not activated in the base configuration of Apache httpd, you have to activate them.
Examples given for xhtml documents served as application/xhtml+xml
It is probably worth fixing the code examples to make them conform to Appendix C of XHTML 1.0. The space before the / is missing.
I also suggest removing the word 'only' from second paragraph. Linking to a style sheet written in one language doesn't mean that the style attributes are going to be using the same language, does it?
You might also want to link to the relevant section of the specification.
Hi David,
I have added a PS explaining the examples were XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml.
And fixed the only. Note that the user agents default to text/css anyway.
so no need to do this if i'm using content="text/html;
I can't get this to work in Apache 2.2 (Debian). Apache documentation doesn't list
as an acceptable attribute for and recommends against the use of with .A simple:
Header set Content-Style-Type text/css
Works to add the header to all content. Will it do any harm to send the header on non-HTML content?