Internet Explorer

By John, 6 January, 2010

Back in the day, all the CSS of the sites I built were in a single file: style.css. Things were easy. I built the site; I organized my styles; I knew where everything was.

Of course, then I discovered the power of leveraging an open-source community. And now there are innumerable developers writing the CSS for my websites. To keep things manageable, each module of functionality has its own stylesheet.

Unfortunately, once you get in the habit of having multiple stylesheets for your website, you will eventually run into a weird problem with Internet Explorer: some of your styles won’t apply. At all.

And if you have sufficient Google-fu, you’ll eventually discover this is a little known bug: Internet Explorer will only load the first 31 stylesheets and will ignore the rest. And this isn’t even limited to our usual suspect, IE6. All versions of IE have this limitation.

The Full Problem
and why I was insane enough to load 993 stylesheets on one page