Enabling Style Sheets

If you're been having trouble getting any styles to appear, you could have an older browser-- or you just might have forgotten to set your browser to use style sheets. It seems simple, but you'd be surprised how many people have made this mistake, myself included!

Here's how to make sure that you have your browser set to use style sheets:

Netscape Navigator 4.04 (Win95 and Macintosh)

Select "Preferences..." under the Edit menu. Once the Preferences dialog comes up, select the "Advanced" Category and make sure "Enable style sheets" is checked. Also make sure that you check the "Enable JavaScript" option. For some barely fathomable reason, Navigator won't use style sheets without having JavaScript turned on. (If this annoys or bothers you as much as it does me, I encourage you to submit a bug report to Netscape.)

MS Internet Explorer 4.0 (Win95)

Select "Internet Options" under the View menu. Once the Preferences dialog comes up, select the "General" tab (if it isn't already selected). Click on the "Accessibility" button and make sure that the first three boxes (labelled "Ignore color on Web pages," "Ignore font style on Web pages," and "Ignore font sizes on Web pages") are all UNchecked. This is also where you can define a default style sheet for your browser (see below *). Additionally, if you want to see backgrounds printed out, you'll have to go back to the main Internet Options dialog, select the "Advanced" tab, and scroll down in the list until you see the option "Print background colors and images." Make sure it's checked.

MS Internet Explorer 4.0 (Macintosh)

Select "Preferences..." under the Edit menu. Once the Preferences dialog comes up, select the "Web Content" section (under "Web Browser"). Make sure that "Show Style Sheets," "Allow page to specify colors," and "Allow page to specify fonts" are all checked.

* If you're using MSIE 4.0 for Win95 and want to specify a default style sheet, here's how: first, write a default style sheet using your favorite text editor and save it to your hard drive as something like default.css. Then follow the directions above to get into the "Accessibility" dialog. Once there, check the "Format documents using my style sheet" and then use the "Browse..." button to select your style sheet. That should be all you need!

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