The life of a CSS developer isn’t all about attending glamorous champagne parties, jet-setting around the world and hanging out with supermodels. In fact, when your CSS doesn’t behave the way it should, the job can be downright tedious. I’ve spent untold hours of my life debugging my code — and I’m guessing I’m not alone here.
But as silly as it may seem, some of the biggest CSS blunders stem from the simplest of errors. Knowing what some of those errors are and remembering to look for them can save you hours of wasted labor. Here are fifteen ways I’ve found to break my CSS for sure — and fifteen things I always look for whenever I have a problem in my code.
Missing a Semicolon
CSS rules are comprised of property-value pairs (declarations) followed by a semicolon. Accordng to the CSS specification, the last declaration doesn’t need a semicolon — because the closing brace effectively ends the declaration just as well. That means something like this is perfectly acceptable:
body {
background-color: #444;
color: #eee }
The only problem is, as soon as you decide to add another declaration to your previous rule, you’ve now made it all too easy to forget to add the semicolon to your once-last rule:
body {
background-color: #444;
color: #eee
font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif }
The result? Your font-family rule never gets applied, because the parser reads “font-family” as part of the color value. Which is why I make a habit of adding the final semicolon in a rule, no matter what.
Missing a Colon
I’ve seen this particular problem crop up frequently while teaching classes on CSS. People get excited when CSS starts to make sense, and their typing speed increases. The downside: this makes errors of omission much more likely. And a missing colon is particularly tough to see, since it sits right in the middle of a declaration. Consider the following two lines:
body { font-family Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }
body { font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }
It’s easy to see how the colon could get overlooked in the jumble of braces, hyphens, semicolons and cryptic words. As a rule of thumb, if you only have one declaration not behaving itself, this is a good place to start looking.
Missing a Brace
{Braces} around a CSS rule are like the circle of life: regular, natural, and expected. And if you ever miss a brace (generally a closing brace for whatever reason) — just like if you have a zombified corpse that refuses to die — you suddenly have all sorts of mayhem on your hands.
When an unsuspecting browser comes across a pair of rules like this:
body {
font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
#wrap {
width: 960px; }
The browser is going to choke. Two opening braces before a closing brace is right out: everything from your #wrap rule (in this example) on would be ignored.
However, this does make debugging easier. Do you have a whole chunk of CSS being ignored? Which is the first rule that is being neglected? There’s a good chance you have an uneven number of braces hanging out in the vicinity.
Misspelled Properties
I consider the following few errors the bane of dyslexic developers everywhere. Generally speaking, I’m a good speller. But when I’m “in the zone” and typing as fast as my fingers can carry me, I tend to transpose a few letters here and there. In writing, this isn’t such a big deal: people can generally figure out what I mean. Computers, sadly, are less discerning.
div { border-bototm: 5px; }
Now, I have no idea what a “bototm” is, but I do know I write the word at least one time in five when I’m trying to refer to the lower edge of an element. I’m lucky in that I have a decent eye for editing and often catch these mistakes as I make them. If you’re not so fortunate, using a program with code coloring like Notepad++ or Adobe Dreamweaver (my personal favorite) can make the job a lot easier: if a property isn’t colored like the other properties, than it’s probably not much of a property at all.
Misspelled Values
Misspellings aren’t limited to just properties. And sometimes a misspelled value can be even more difficult to notice:
#wrap { padding: 10px 20pz 25px 20px; }
Unfortunately for the rule above, I’m fairly sure only Snoop Dogg and I have ever tried to measure elements in pizzles. Instead of the generous padding you’d expect this rule to generate, this one misspelled unit renders the entire declaration invalid.
Misspelled Classes and IDs
No matter how often I create a div with an ID of “navigation,” I still find myself writing rules that look more like this:
#navigaiton { float: left; }
This can be a frustrating error to track down, because color-coded editors won’t help you out here: you could just as easily purposefully name an element “navigaiton” if you really wanted. But I’d recommend against it.
Improperly Ordered Values
Some CSS properties have a built-in shorthand, which is a great way to save yourself a few lines of code. Unfortunately, most of the shorthand properties are very picky about the order of the property’s values. For example:
div { font: 2em Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }
a { font: "Times New Roman", serif 1.5em; }
The first rule will result in all divs gaining a specific typeface and size. The second rule will result in a debugging session — while it’s okay to leave some values out of the font declaration, changing up the order of the values will result in problems.
Measurement Values Without Units
CSS Newbie reader Justin reminded me of this problem the last time I wrote about CSS faux pas. With only a few limited exceptions, all measurement values in CSS need a unit of measurement associated with it. Take the following rule for example:
#wrap { margin: 3; }
Three what? Ems? Inches? Pizzles? The flexibility of CSS that allows us to pick from several units of measurement also means specifying a unit is fairly important.
Bonus — Two unit-agnostic measurements:
- Values of zero don’t need a unit of measurement. Turns out, zero pixels and zero miles are exactly the same length.
- Line heights needn’t have a specific unit. A line height of “1.5″, for example, will simply assume you meant “1.5 times my font size.” For more on this phenomenon, visit Eric Meyer’s article on Unitless Line Heights.
Competing Identical Rules
Once a stylesheet gets to be a certain length, it can be difficult to remember which rules you’ve already written unless your CSS is very well organized. And two identical rules at different spots in your CSS file can wreak havoc on your design and sanity alike.
ul li { margin: 0 2em; }
... 300 lines later ...
ul li { margin: 0; padding: 10px; }
In this scenario, the latter rule would win out over the former, thus removing the margin and applying padding instead. But if you’ve forgotten about this duplicity, you might go back into your CSS later and try editing the first rule only, and remain perplexed as to why, no matter how you tweak your margin, you can’t seem to make any difference.
Unintentionally Competing Rules
A similar problem could force your CSS to compete with itself in ways you didn’t expect. For example, if you had the following code in your XHTML:
<div id="navigation" class="nav">...</div>
You could refer to this element by either its class or its ID. The problem arises when you do both, and forget that you’ve done so:
.nav { width: 50%; }
... later in the code ...
#navigation { width: 500px; }
This code would result in a fixed-width navigation bar, even though the first rule would suggest a more flexible width. Again, having a well organized stylesheet is the easiest way to avoid this problem.
Calling a Class an ID (or vice-versa)
I fall into this particular trap all the time. I’ll write a rule like this:
.navigation {
float: left;
width: 100%;
height: 4em; }
And nothing will happen! It often takes me a minute or two to realize that the real problem is that I’d given my navigation bar an ID, not a class. My best advice here is to pick a naming system that works well for you and be consistent. If you always call your top navigation bar “#topnav”, for example, you’re far less likely to misremember your element names.
Using a Nonexistent Property
Not all CSS properties are named the most intuitively. For example, this might look like a perfectly acceptable rule to someone new to CSS:
body { text-size: 3em; }
The problem is, while there are certainly several text-riffic properties, text-size isn’t one of them. Instead, we use font-size. Which means that the rule above wouldn’t do much of anything. Intelligent code-coloring editors like Dreamweaver usually make this sort of debugging much easier: if it’s not a real CSS property, it won’t be the same color as the surrounding properties. That’s usually my first clue I’ve done something wrong.
Using a Nonexistent Value
This is a sister stumbling block to the one above. Some values just seem to make sense, but will fail you nonetheless:
td { vertical-align: center; }
You would assume that this rule would vertically center your table text, right? Unfortunately, while “center” is indeed an acceptable value for text-align, vertical-align uses the perhaps less intuitive “middle” instead. And you’d have to ask a better educated rhetorician than me to figure out the difference between middle and center in this context, because I’m at a loss.
Improperly Matching Properties and Values
Certain CSS declarations can look correct even to the trained eye, unless that eye is paying particularly close attention. For example:
a { text-transform: italic; }
While this might look like a perfectly reasonable rule, you won’t end up with italicized text. That’s because “italic” belongs to the font-style property, not the text-transform property. But even most advanced editors won’t catch that bug, as you’ve used a perfectly reasonable property and value — you’ve just used them in an inappropriate combination.
Not Closing Comments
The gentle persons at BlogThemeMachine tipped me off to this common CSS problem. Can you spot the major difference between these two sets of rules?
/* Navigation goes here. */
#nav {
float: left;
width: 100%;
height: 3em; }
/* Navigation goes here. /*
#nav {
float: left;
width: 100%;
height: 3em; }
The only difference is that the second rule has an improperly closed comment tag: /* versus */. That seemingly insignificant difference can result in entire swaths of your CSS suddenly not working. In fact, this tiny blunder will negate all your CSS from the start of your comment until you successfully close a second comment. Which if you’re using comments to organize your CSS means an entire section of your site will lose its styling.
These fifteen tiny blunders are sure to give you hours upon hours of CSS frustration… unless you know to watch for them. What are some other self-introduced bugs you often find in your code? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
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