Oh, bum. While I was doing the site redesign, I was running the code off of my local machine. Then I tried the bits out on the Sunpig web server, and everything looked OK. But only because I hadn’t tried it out in Mozilla.
I used Mozilla to look at the new designs this evening, and lo! No CSS styles were being applied. At first I thought the stylesheet was broken somehow, and than Mozilla was therefore ignoring it completely. Nope. Then I tried every combination of attributes on the <link> tag to see if that was making a difference. Nuh-uh.
Google to the rescue. I found this page (on brain-stream.com), which highlights the real issue: my web server is serving up CSS documents (.css) with a MIME type of “text/plain”. And Mozilla doesn’t like that. Damn.
And the solution that is outlined won’t work for me, because I don’t own the server, and therefore don’t have access to the Apache httpd.conf file.
On the positive side, it showed quite satisfactorily that even without the stylesheet, the Sunpig site is still eminently readable. So the design decisions I made paid off. Yay!