does a server have to announce that style sheets are "text/css"?

[Seth Gordon]

I've been making our family home page (http://ropine.com/)
standards-compliant, and encountered an odd "feature" of Mozilla and
Galeon.  If an HTML page has a DOCTYPE declaration (i.e., the browser
renders it in "strict" rather than "quirks" mode) and a link to a
stylesheet, but the server does not declare that stylesheet to be
"Content-type: text/css", then the browser will ignore the stylesheet.

Is this actually following the standard?  The CSS1 spec says nothing
about this, and in the CSS2 spec, "The text/css content type" (3.4) is
not part of the "Conformance" section (3.2).  And it seems odd for the
browser to be so picky about the Content-type header; unlike a situation
where the browser is sent to a random URI and has to decide whether it's
HTML or plain text or what, when a browser is told to fetch a CSS
document, it *knows* it's fetching a CSS document.

-- 
"Bush claimed to be a uniter, not a divider.  One thing's for sure:
he and his people aren't adders or subtracters."  --Paul Krugman
// seth gordon // sethg at ropine.com // http://ropine.com/sethg/cv.html //