Apache CSS problem

[vodhner at cox.net]

OK, case closed.  Before 4 am I had two responses.  Several more in quick order.

All from the PLUG list, incidentally ... this was all over before my query got past the moderator and appeared on the azipa list, some 8 hours later.  Reminds me of the signs at Owl's house, in Winnie the Pooh:

    Owl lived at The Chestnuts, an old-world residence
    of great charm, which was grander than anybody
    else's, or seemed so to Bear, because it had both a
    knocker and a bell-pull. Underneath the knocker
    there was a notice which said:

    PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD.

    Underneath the bell-pull there was a notice which said:

    PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID.

I guess going to azipa is something like the second notice, eh?

Josh Zeidner wrote:
> Try double checking relative URL in CSS reference (try coding absolute URL to make sure).  Did you move some pages?

Nope.  Several others agreed with that as a suspect.  But the culprit turned out to be something I put in the .htaccess file in my css directory, saying "serve-as-is" for all css files.  

That was when I was trying various types of voodoo to keep Apache from trying to execute my css file as a CGI script.  You can tell my Apache admin skills are in an early stage.  BTW, I own this entire Apache / LXR / pgsql / swish-e / ctags environment as an ordinary user, it's one of those private port 8080 deals for intranet access only.  Getting it all to work has been an adventure.  (Adventure:  Someone else having a hard time, very far away.)

So I removed the "serve-as-is" and left the force-type text/css, and now my css works, but wait, that's not all!

Remarkably this seems also to have fixed my problem with expirations.  I was sending out several http headers and a Meta element to force pages to expire after a certain number of minutes, and Firefox and IE showed that they had this information, but both kept serving the stale page.  Now expiration is working (not tested with IE yet, but we all use Firefox here).  So they must have been confused by the failure to receive the css, or by receiving it in some ugly format.

Go team!

Thanks,

Vic