tu has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

When I try to reference an external CSS file, it does not work. My header code for HTML output looks something like the following: 
print header;
print<<END;
<html><head>
<link rel="stylesheet"  href="member_style.css" >
</head>

[download]
---------- I have also tried to do it these ways: 
print header;
print start_html(  -style=>{-src=>'http://localhost/cgi-bin/template/h
+ardcode/member_style.css'} );

print start_html(  -style=>{-src=>'./member_style.css'} );

print start_html(  -style=>{-src=>'member_style.css'} );

[download]
thanks.

tu

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CSS will not work
by Trimbach (Curate) on Aug 06, 2001 at 22:58 UTC
    You need to give src a full URL, not a path. So this should work: 
    print start_html(  -style=>{-src=>'http://www.somewhere.com/member_sty
+le.css'} );

    [download]

    Gary Blackburn
    Trained Killer

[reply]
[d/l]
      A full URL? That's news to me. I use the following code. Looking at the code here, I may be using an ancient idiom that has since been superceded, but I offer it for completeness' sake.

      use CGI qw/Link/;
my $q = new CGI;
print $q->header(),
  $q->start_html({
    -title => 'title of my page',
    -head  => Link({-rel=>'stylesheet', -type=>'text/css', -href=>'/fo
+o.css'}),
    });

      [download]

      I sorta like this, because it reminds me just what exactly I'm asking the script to emit.

      update: I typed the above code in from memory, and in the original incarnation, I wrote -href=>'foo.css'. I checked some production scripts, and what I do In Real Life is -href=>'/foo.css'. This is not a relative reference (correct me if I am wrong), in that I am not using -href=>'../foo.css' -- I guess you could say it's absolute on the current server.

      I was taking issue with the explicit http://... I don't believe that that is necessary, and it makes it a smidgin easier to transfer the script from one host to another.

      --
      g r i n d e r
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
        Well, yeah, but some web servers don't resolve relative pathnames nicely, and it's generally not a good idea to put your css files in the same directory as your executable scripts (as someone else already pointed out.) In such cases, a fully qualified URL is your friend.

        Gary Blackburn
        Trained Killer

[reply]
Re: CSS will not work
by miyagawa (Chaplain) on Aug 06, 2001 at 23:24 UTC
    Can your "member_style.css" be fetched via HTTP? For example with Apache, /cgi-bin/ is ScriptAliased, so any static files on that directory can't be accessed directly.

    Put it in static DocumentRoot directory instead. Hope this helps.

    --
    Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
    miyagawa@cpan.org

[reply]
Re: CSS will not work
by zeno (Friar) on Feb 24, 2003 at 12:29 UTC
[reply]
Re: CSS will not work
by wardk (Deacon) on Aug 07, 2001 at 00:00 UTC

    probably a silly question, but usually CSS files are in an html directory, and code in cgi-bin (or similar) appears you are looking in the same place as the code... 

    # assuming it's in the root...
print start_html(  -style=>{-src=>'/member_style.css'} )

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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