Debugging tip for CSS

[justken]

Hi all,

This is my first post; hope it's useful.

I discovered the other day that one source of frustration with CSS files is that they aren't validated very well. I had a problem that slipped through Adobe CS4's validation, which resulted in changes to CSS targets having no effect. Very frustrating. It turned out that one of my targets had an opening brace ('{') but no closing brace. Everything in the .css file after the missing closing brace was ignored, which is why the changes I was trying to make had no effect, and why new CSS targets that I added were ignored (in Adobe, new targets are added at the end of the file.) Once I discovered this problem and added the closing brace, everything worked fine.

Hope this little tidbit helps. The proactive solution is to add some sort of validation to your CSS files, whether it be loading them into a smart editor that can check for balanced delimiters, or just eyeballing the code.

JustKen

[xav0989]

It is in fact a very useful tip! I'd like to add that you can also pass your files to http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ that will validate your CSS.