Forum Discussion
SharePoint Page Layout CSS Error "invalid or empty reference to a Cascading Style Sheet"
When encountering the following error after creating a SharePoint page layout the cause may be how you are calling a font as a style sheet.
An invalid or empty reference to a Cascading Style Sheet file was specified. Valid references must specify only a filename that ends with a ".css" extension
In my situation the offending line of HTML was as follows:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300,400,400i,700|Source+Sans+Pro:300,400,500,600,700|Crete+Round:400i" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
As you can see above, the href attribute's value does not end with a ".css" extension. While it is easy to add ".css", and it does not appear to break the use of fonts within the web page, the next error you would encounter is:
styles/https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300,400,400i,700|Source+Sans+Pro:300,400,500,600,700|Crete+Round:400i.css contains invalid character '?'.
The workaround is to reference Google Fonts within a style sheet using "import".
