Saturday, June 6, 2015

CSS Styles Not Displayed

As I mentioned in my previous post, titled "forums With Attitude" I am having a problem with CSS styles being displayed when the web page is served by Apache, but the pages display normally when they're simply opened from the desktop as html file under windows.
It's beginning to look like this is a malware problem. I just updated "Windows Defender", so I decided to go ahead and run the "quick scan". The scan uncovered a piece of browser malware (see image below).



Unfortunately, removing this did not solve my problem, so I started poking around with other things.
With "Firebug" a Firefox debugger ad-on, it showed that my stylesheet had been replaced with a stylesheet using made-up style rules that begin with the word "yuck". However, Windows defender either didn't find the cause of this, or the malware can defeat Windows Defender.
I suspect the latter because after Windows Defender supposedly removed the malware, I scanned parts of the system (windows) again using "Custom Scan" and I found that Windows Defender will not scan the "Users" or "Windows" folder.
So, no solution yet. Still working on it. But I just wanted to let you know that this problem may be caused by other means than those that the forum guru's stated.

Forums With "Attitude"

I've just gotta say something about these internet forums on LAMP / WAMP topics. I've never been a big user of forums, but recently, I've run into a few problems I didn't think I could solve on my own, but eventually did solve, after the solutions found on forums didn't work. Also, I've never actually had to post a question because I always found my problem to be well covered. So I personally haven't been insulted by these snobby people on the forums, but after reading through many of the forums, I became irritated  with the “attitude” of some of these “smart” people who's solutions don't seem to work. Which is a major part of why I started this blog. I figurured, why not just share my solutions without judgement or the smarty-pants remarks. After all, people don't go to forums to be scolded or be insulted by someones sarcasim, they're just looking for HELP !

I'll give you one example. I'm currently having a problem with web pages served by Apache 2.4.12 not rendering CSS styles. Now other people have posted the same problem to these forums, and for the most part, all they've gotten for an answer is : “Apache doesn't render CSS, the browser does”.
They say that Apache has nothing to do with this problem, but apparently it does, because when I save a webpage to the desktop as an “html” file and click on it, the browser opens up and displays the page with the CSS styles as it should, even though the CSS file is located in, and called from, the Apache webroot folder “htdocs”. But when I put the HTML file in “htdocs” and serve it from Apache, there are no CSS styles rendered in ANY browser ( IE,Chrome,Firefox).
These “smart” people seem to completely ignore that it might be an Apache configuration problem, which I saw with PHP, when Apache wouldn't serve PHP pages, but only the text of the PHP code itself. Hey “smart” people, Apache isn't the  interpreter for  PHP code either, but it has to be configured properly in order to serve PHP pages properly.
So I'm going to work on Apache configuration for this problem, and as always, I'll post the solution when I figure it out.
Meanwhile,to all you forum geeks: If you're so sensitive to the way a question is asked, or which topic it properly belongs under, or having your precious time wasted, as when you tell people “come back after you do this or that,  then stop wasting your time, and ours, on the forums. After all, the time wasting is a choice, you don't have to "waste" your time on the forums, because believe me, most of the time your “help” isn't that good.