title: CSS styles disappear if I type an argument after index.php
body: <p>My CSS styles stop working if I type any argument following my landing page index.php</p>
  
  <p>I'm adding/testing new code on my development localhost server running xampp, coding in php/javascript/html/css.
  EDIT: my development server is Windows Vista, and I use Firefox version 10.0.1 right now.</p>
  
  <p>Today I was adding mod_rewrite support to allow passing an argument with the URL for my site
  and stumbled on a problem I'd not thought to test before.</p>
  
  <p>The mod_rewrite I was developing allows the user to specify a text string after the site name, such as:</p>
  
  <pre><code>     http://www.mysite.com/Stonehenge-artifact1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and my mod_rewrite processes that argument and does something meaningful -- specifically, it redirects from my landing page index.php to a totally different page that displays a photo of Stonehenge-artifact1.</p>
  
  <p>The problem -- if the user types www.mysite.com/index.php/ialkselasdfa
  all my CSS styles disappear -- the index.php landing page special fonts and colors in my CSS stylesheet go missing.</p>
  
  <p>I backed out all my mod_rewrite changes, including completely removing my custom .htaccess file in the mysite.com folder space (using a local custom copy of .htaccess is one of the steps for mod_rewrite).</p>
  
  <p>I wanted to see if the CSS styles would disappear now that I was back to yesterday's (pre-mod_rewrite changes) code.  Sure enough, my CSS stylesheet goes AWOL if I type an argument, ANY argument, after index.php.</p>
  
  <p>So the following URLs (for example) somehow disable my CSS stylesheet for index.php</p>
  
  <pre><code>www.mysite/index.php/foo
  www.mysite/index.php/css-whereAreYou
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(NOTE: the reason I brought up the mod_rewrite is to explain why I'm typing something at the end of my site's URL in the first place.  Were it not for me testing that new mod_rewrite code, I would not have found this problem.)</p>
  
  <p>Here is my inclusion in my index.php of my CSS stylesheet:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;html&gt;
   &lt;head&gt;
     &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"&gt;
     &lt;link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="globalStyles.css" /&gt;
   &lt;/head&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My globalStyles.css is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>root { 
    display: block;
  }
  
  body
  {
     color: black;
     font-family: Gill, Helvetica, sans-serif;
     font-size: 9pt;
     background-color: RGB(243,239,240); /* light blue */
  } 
  
  p
  {
      color: black;    
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Why is my index.php landing page not getting the CSS styles when I add characters after index.php?</p>