IS Manager wrote
I took the approach of making a pure CSS skin but when I installed it there are a couple problems with it. Things are missing from my html file I used to build it.
#1 My design has a toppane in it and I dont see that in the layout of the page. When I view the HTML I see all the tags and the CSS applied.
#2 My style class variables are not applied at all which Im not sure why this would be my css file along with all the gif and jpg images are in the skin package I installed.
Any ideas?
From the code you provided, it's obviously that your design is not a pure CSS skin. You're using tables to layout your site.
The reason I recommend to double check if you have specified the proper doctype because it would apple to the XHTML/CSS design.
It's not a good practice to reference your toppane as #dnn_toppane in your css, It's dynamically generated by dotnetnuke so I strongly recommend to give it a class instead.
Technically, you don't need to reference your css file in the html, by default dnn will pull the skin.css file and apply to the skin. In addition, if you're developing your skin using html, dnn will just ignore whatever comes ouside the body tag. So you don't need anything outside and include the body tag.
You skin.css does not get applied, my guess is to double check to see if the skin is actually packaged properly and the css file is in place.
If you have multiple css files, make sure the skin.css file is on the same level with your skin.