Real-time Preview does not render CSS

[Raymondo17]

Dreamweaver 21.2 is not displaying my pages correctly when I try to view them via Real-time Preview. The pages look fine, fully rendered while within the Dreamweaver application, but when I try to view them in any browser associated with Real-time Preview, the raw page displays but the CSS does not. Yes, I've checked my code for errors. Yes, I've specified a site under Manage Sites. Yes, I've tried multiple Dreamweaver projects using multiple browsers. But still, any time I try to use Real-time Preview, the styling does not show up. This just started happening about a week or two ago. Any suggestions?

[Nancy OShea]

@Raymondo17,

Did you define a local site folder before you began this project?   Site > Manage sites...

Is the link to your stylesheet pointing to the site and not a file:/// on your local hard drive?

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/bootstrap.min.css">

You can right-click on the open document tag and select Open in Browser (without Real-Time Preview).

You can also permanently disable Real-Time Preview from your Preferences panel.

Hope that helps.  Post back if you need more help.

[Raymondo17]

Nancy, thank you for the thorough reply.

The answer is yes to your questions about defining a local site and the HTML pointing to the correct location for the stylesheet. This was occurring with every InDesign document I have, including years-old sites that have worked fine before. Regardless, I'm happy to report that this morning everything is magically working again! I don't know if Adobe did a behind-the-scenes update or what, but without me making any alterations, my sites are rendering in browsers once again. Yay!

I appreciate your input. The bit about right-clicking on the open document tab was new to me, so I'm happy to learn something new.  🙂 

[Nancy OShea]

I'm happy to report that this morning everything is magically working again! I don't know if Adobe did a behind-the-scenes update or what...

==========

Probably not an Adobe update.  But your operating system may have updated.  And I suspect you just needed to restart your computer.  Glad it's working again. 🙂

[Raymondo17]

I can assure you it wasn't an issue of restarting my computer. The issue went on for weeks and I shut down my computer every night. A system update? Perhaps. Or maybe it was the Adobe Rain Dance I did around my computer, who can say.  🙂

[Raymondo17]

Aaaaand we're back to it not rendering the CSS.  It was fun while it lasted.  😞

So, I did use your trick of right-clicking on the file name tab at the top of an open document and selecting Open in Browser, and that worked great. So I can use that, but I'm not clear on what the difference is between Open in Browser and Real-time Preview. They both display the page you're working on in a browser. What's the difference?

[Nancy OShea]

Real-Time Preview uses Adobe's servers and renders your page inside an <iframe>.  It never has played nice with my local testing server so I don't use it. 

Ordinary Preview in browsers bypasses the the need for Adobe servers and just opens a document in your browser.  No muss, no fuss. And it works just fine for most things.