Referencing a CSS file from another local directory in a link tag HTML

Check your paths, Best practices is to always use a relative paths. Ex

If your stylesheet is called style.css the link should be:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />

If you have the css file in a subdirectoy (and the subdirectory is called styledirectory) the link becomes:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styledirectory/style.css" />

If the css file is in the parent directory of the html file the links becomes:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../style.css" />

.. goes up 1 directory, if you need two you could do: ../../

Sample Folder structure

Assuming structure is like that then,

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/BGsampleSS.css" />

Name files without spaces too.

try using the file:/// protocol.

href='file:///C:\Users\UserName\Desktop\Web_testing\BGsample SS.css'

If that doesn't work (and you say it doesnt), then my guess is that it won't work at all due to it being prevented by security features in the browser. It depends on where you are loading the main HTML content from, but if the main HTML is loaded from the internet then I can understand why the browser might object to loading the CSS from the client machine's local file system.

One final thing to try: You might try setting up a web server on your machine, putting the mystyles.css file into the web folder, and loading it into the page using:

href='http://localhost/mystyles.css'

I can't really suggest much else, I don't think.

You should be using '../' to move back in your path, and then into the directory with the CSS file.

Please always follow the CSS External Style Sheet way. In your case the CSS file cannot be located. Try adding \ before SS.css

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="C:\Users\UserName\Desktop\Web_testing\BGsample\SS.css">