Design By Tim

I encountered a limit on the number of STYLE tags that IE 7 will render, which appears to be 31.

This is an old issue, documented at Microsoft’s support site, but this article makes no notation that IE 7 is an affected product, even though it is. I thought that it would be good to document this should any other web developer run into it, although yes, technically the spec says there should only be one STYLE tag in the HEAD section of the document.

SYMPTOMS
All style tags after the first 30 style tags on an HTML page are not applied. Occasionally, you may also receive the following error message:

The page you are looking for might have been moved or had its name changed.

If you use a network monitor tool to capture network traffic, you may notice that a TCP reset occurs when Internet Explorer is receiving the page. Internet Explorer then generates another POST request if the original request was a POST request. Or, Internet Explorer may send a GET request instead.

This style tag limitation may also affect the viewing of .xml files by using .xsl files. When the .xsl file has style tags embedded inside the document, you receive the following error message when you try to view the .xml file:

Internet Explorer could not open the Internet Site: file://c:\aaa.xml

When you click OK, you receive the following error message:

The page cannot be displayed

This is now making me concerned what other issues there are with limits?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 6:30 am and is filed under CSS, Development, GUI, HTML, Rant, Windows, code.