To work as intended, your CSS style sheet needs a correct document parse tree. This means you should use valid HTML.
Parse error - Unrecognized : <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html lang="en-us"> <head> <title></title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" /> <style type="text/css"> .inner { border: 2px dotted black; background-color: #ffffff; padding: 15px; width: 50%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }