Page styling is wrong in some browsers

I have a pretty small, bland Foswiki installation for personal use. The web server is lighttpd running on a mininalist Ubuntu install. The only customizations I've made so far have been to update the site logos and add a bit of content. I recently upgraded from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2; everything seemed fine.

I then upgraded my every-day web browser from Opera 11.0 to 11.1, and immediately noticed a problem with my Foswiki site - the styling is completely neutral and the page layout is all twisted up. From looking at the support questions on foswiki.org, I surmised that this is a problem with access to the CSS files. However, as best I can tell, I can access them: the file system permissions and owner look correct, and I can load the CSS URLs in Opera.

So I started testing in other browsers and found that some browsers render the page with stylesheets, and others aren't. Just testing the browsers I have immediate access to:

Browser	Styles?
Opera 11.1	No
Opera 11.0	Yes
Safari for iPhone 4.2.1	No
Opera Mini 5.0 for iPhone	No
Internet Explorer 9.0	No
Internet Explorer 9.0 (compatability view)	Yes
Internet Explorer 8.0	Yes
Internet Explorer 8.0 (compatability view)	Yes

My thought is that there is some recent security update made to these browsers related to how they load and handle CSS, and my configuration is somehow running afoul of this update. A skim through the Opera changelogs doesn't reveal anything to me, but I could be missing something.

Any thoughts on what could be causing this? Or how I might go about troubleshooting? If anyone wants to take a look at the site, it should be accessible at http://cobalt.dnsdojo.com.

Looking at your site using Firefox and Chromium, I don't get any styles at all. Using Firebug, your server is serving the css and javascript files with somewhat unusual headers, so I wonder if this is confusing the browsers. For example,

base.css - from a working site:

Date   Sat, 16 Apr 2011 04:21:04 GMT
Server   Apache
Last-Modified   Sat, 16 Apr 2011 02:17:30 GMT
Etag   "208cf-bfc-4a0ffc2baa47b"
Accept-Ranges   bytes
Content-Length   3068
Content-Type   text/css

base.css from cobalt.dnsdojo.com

Content-Type   application/octet-stream
Accept-Ranges   bytes
Content-Length   2505
Date   Sat, 16 Apr 2011 04:29:52 GMT
Server   lighttpd/1.4.19

Could the working browsers have cached copies of the css?

-- GeorgeClark - 16 Apr 2011

That got me pointed in the right direction. By default lighttpd uses application/octet-stream for all mime-types. Apparently this has never mattered before, but it seems like browsers are now requiring CSS to be text/css. I've updated the lighttpd configuration with some sensible mime-types; now my site looks fine.

Thanks!