Web design software for displaying CSS

I’ve been using Dreamweaver and/or Homesite to do design, and I’m really disapointed in the ability to see the results of my style sheet without uploading everything to the server. Is there a decent piece of software that will enable me to preview pages with linked stylesheets accurately? I feel like homesite should be able to do this for me, but it’s been very inconsistant and I’m not sure why. Sometimes the previews include the styles, and other times they don’t.

Why not just point a browser at your local copy of the site?

Yeah, style sheets aren’t like PHP or some kind of script that needs to be run through a web server to display. It should do just fine if you point your browser to your local copy.

I do web design for a living, and DreamWeaver displays almost all CSS perfectly for me. I never have a problem just hitting “F12” and seeing it in Firefox perfectly. You shouldn’t need to put it on a server by any means.

Dreamweaver’s Design view does let you preview some CSS appearances, but in general it’s necessary to save the page locally and load/view it in a browser locally. Especially if you’re using javascript, etc.

I have used an external CSS editor which came with DW, TopStyle. But even then you have to save the page and the inline styles or stylesheet and load them in a browser.

Ok, maybe I’m just being daft. When I save and open the file in a browser I get the url:

file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Nate/My%20Documents/WebProjects/Perrelli/famigliaperrelli.com/index.htm

The style sheet is referenced in the page thusly:

<link href="/primary_styles.css" type=“text/css” rel=“stylesheet” />

It lives in the same folder as the page I’m trying to load. But, I don’t get any of my styles.

If only. Is there some ‘site’ setting that perhaps I have set wrong?

Because “/primary_styles.css” begins with a slash, it’s an absolute URL, and is therefore looking in the root of your filesystem for the file. If you change it to a relative URL it should work. Since it’s in the same place as the file, just use “primary_styles.css”.

Try just using “<link href=“primary_styles.css” type=“text/css” rel=“stylesheet” />” and see what you get. The extra slash may throw off browsers, and shouldn’t be necessary if the style sheet is in the same directory.

Remove the leading “/” in the href to make it a relative link.

Must type faster…

Awesome! Thanks guys.

Since I have you, here’s a random question, why would IE not recognize the width value in this:

body {background: white; width: 750px; font: normal 12px Verdana, sans-serif;}

I have no images or files that would force the width to be larger, and in Firefox the size comes out fine. In IE it’s much wider; it looks to be around 1200px.