Failed to parse the stylesheet

[MalaurieSandD]

Dear Adobe Community, 

I really need your help right now.

I am currently working on a project on Robohelp that went fine until "Error: failed to parse the stylesheet" appears at the bottom-right corner. The versio I use is : Robohelp (Version 2022.4.179). 

Any ideas ? 

Thank you all, 

Malaurie36822156k70y.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

What were you doing when the message appeared? Is it happening with the sample project at all?

[Peter Grainge]

@Jeff_Coatsworth It will not happen in the samples unless the user makes changes that trigger it.

@MalaurieSandD Jeff has asked the right question. I'm guessing but you have made some change(s) to styles whilst working on a topic and RoboHelp is seeing the change(s) as invalid.

Have you tried switching to Source View? I would expect the issue to be highlighted somehow. Try the same with your CSS file if not.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[MalaurieSandD]

Hi again!

• The message appeared when I clicked on my css file. 
•  

To make sure it was not an error of templates changes, I used a new one untouched and it still doesn't work. I'll give you an exemple : 

My CSS and the results : 

The author view in Robohelp : 

 The source view : 

The css view and the script I put directly in my topic :

And this is the output : 

 Before the failed message of the css, everything was working perfectly and the javascript was also working, it just happened like that, and I don't understand why. I also verified that I included my css in my topics and it's there.

Thank you for your help !

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

You've also got a typo in that first warning line - I think you want to say "first flight" not "first slight".

[MalaurieSandD]

Oh thanks!

[Peter Grainge]

@MalaurieSandD 

If you want to change your forum name to something without the string of numbers, in RoboHelp go to Help > Manage My Account. There you will see Edit Profile. Click that and scroll down to Screen Name and remove the numbers. What is left must be unique so you may need to add something.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[Peter Grainge]

If you open the CSS in RoboHelp, it should show the code it doesn't like. Are you not seeing anything?

When it was working, was that in 2022.4 or an earlier version?

If you temporarily remove that script, does it still show the error?

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[MalaurieSandD]

I am not seeing anything unfortunately.

When it was working, it was an earlier version, like the one just before the 2022.4 but it started to not work before I do the update (I was checking for help and I saw that that kind of glitches could be solved by having the latest version. 

I removed the script from the topic, it still show the error, but if I removed the little part of my css linked with the javascript, I can have the author view of the css (which is a good beginning!). Therefore I guess there is an error in my css, but I don't understand why because I didn't touched it and it used to work like that.

Maybe a problem with the script part ? Does it have to be somewhere specifically ? 

[Peter Grainge]

Can you recall what you were doing when it started to go wrong?

The new UI versions of RoboHelp apply CSS3 and HTML5 rules strictly. I have seen some issues anywhere CDATA appears. Beyond that I don't know what to suggest. 

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[MalaurieSandD]

I was adding my script and a specific css in my topic, to give my page a better animation.

Everything worked. But the day after I reopened my Robohelp project, and my css showed the error message "failed to parse the stylesheet".

I guess I need to remove my entire script to make it work again.

[WoutJacobs · Accepted solution]

Problem seems to be straightforward when looking at the images.

area {
target="_blank";
}

This is not valid CSS. You cannot use the equal sign like that.

Easy to test, just remove that piece of CSS and check again.

[MalaurieSandD]

Oh gosh, it works !

I just changed the equal sign by ":" and now, it works perfectly ! (It did that before not working at all haha but still). 

Thank you so much !

[WoutJacobs]

Good to hear.

I guess changing '=' to ':' works in the sense that the CSS is syntactically valid now, but I don't think it does anything. 'target' is not actually a CSS property (https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/index.php), nor is '_blank' a real CSS value.

target="_blank" is a HTML attribute for hyperlinks: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_target.asp