However, for reasons unknown, when I uploaded my CSS to S3 it was saved with a content type of binary/octet-stream. As any g33k will know that's an encoding used to tranfer generic files, not a specific content type like text/css, or audio/mp3. Whilst this doesn't faze IE or Safari it did cause a problem for Firefox. The CSS file was supposed to @import some other CSS from other files but when Firefox saw the CSS, and the fact that it was in a binary encoding it refused to parse it as CSS. This resulted in no CSS loading and the entire page looking broken.
Moving the CSS to a standard Apache host solved the problem but I wanted it hosted on S3. I asked the question in the S3 support forum and got a reply which pointed me at Bucket Explorer. I used this to manually set the content type to text/css and the problem is solved in Firefox now.
Was this a bug in the way Firefox handles CSS files with the wrong content-type coming from the server or was it a bug in the way my S3 client failed to identify the file as CSS and set the content-type accordingly? We may not know but I'll be submitting some bug reports for sure.
UPDATE: I have submitted a bug report to bugzilla and I have contacted Interarchy support as well, fingers crossed somebody will resolve the issue. In the mean time I have found that Transmit does correctly set the content-type of CSS files it uploads to S3.
3 comments:
Your bugzilla bug has been reported as a duplicate of:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156145
Which was reported in 2002.
It's status is 'verified invalid'.
Ah yes, I saw that. They have rolled it into a different bug too. One poster suggests that it's not a bug, it's the proper behaviour.
In order for the pages to render consistently across browsers I used a DOCTYPE of HTML4.01 Strict. It's entirely possible that strict adherence to that schema means that CSS files must be served with a content type of text/css. If firefox was keeping to the standard, and it probably was, then it was correct to not render the CSS. I haven't tried this but if I went with a more lax DOCTYPE it might render fine. Curious.
Hey ho, at least it's something they're aware of.
Yes, Firefox is correct to ignore CSS files served with a MIME type other than text/css. The theory is that the content of the file is not to be trusted; it may look like CSS but if the MIME type says it's something else then it's something else (perhaps some other, subtly different style-rule format that the browser doesn't understand.)
I personally think this is precisely backward, but it'd break more stuff than it would fix to change it now. (Also, there are maniacs, and I use the term advisedly, who will defend the current rule to the death.)
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