Internet Explorer issue - maximum of 32 CSS @import

March 11, 2008 on 7:11 pm | In General |

To be honest, I just ran into an issue that I thought was fairly ridiculous.

Internet Explorer restricts you to a maximum of 32 @import statements in your CSS file.

For the less advanced developers, you can import another CSS file from within one of your CSS files. Consider it like a #include in C programming, or an include statement in PHP. The syntax would look like this:

@import url("mystyle.css");

When you are developing a complex web application, you are likely to have many CSS files. Admittedly, we haven’t cleaned up the CSS structure and removed any outdated CSS stylings for a while, in our project. We shouldn’t have imported so many. But it struck me as ridiculous for Internet Explorer having such limits. (Needless to say, Firefox has no such ridiculous limits.) To me, it just seems like a programming flaw (using a 5-bit number as indexing for imported files?).

Reference: http://www.juniper.net/security/auto/vulnerabilities/vuln3394.html (the topic discussed in this link is not related, but pay attention to the end of the second paragraph: “Internet Explorer imposes a maximum limit of 32 imports that an individual styleSheet object can hold, and a depth limit of three on the number of style sheets that may be included within the style sheet chain.”)

Update (3/27/08): Apparently, IE doesn’t only impose a number of files limit — but even a file size limit for each CSS file. The IE CSS file size limit seems to be ~288kb. Again, Firefox doesn’t seem to have such limits. Way to go IE, for continuing screwing web developers up.