I just tracked down the cause of a persistent “Failed to load content css:” error, where the file it supposedly failed to load was the editor-style.css file from a child theme folder. But, I am running the same theme and child theme on 10 different websites, and only one of them was issuing an error message, so it’s not a theme problem, though the site with the problem was the only site on a particular host. But, I have a testing server on which I can run copies of all ten websites, and they all worked fine on my testing server except for the same site.
After reading https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/read-this-first-wordpress-4-8-master-list/#post-9221234 I looked closely and discovered a typo in an @import() line of the editor-style.css file and fixed it. But the WordPress editor was still kept throwing the error, even when I totally eliminated the @import() line from the editor-style.css file. Naturally, I was doing what I thought were ‘hard refreshes’ when testing, but, if the editor-style.css file was present in my child theme, then the WordPress editor always issued the failure to load warning message, even if the editor-style.css file was totally blank. I even replaced all WordPress, theme, and child theme files on the bad site from a working site on my testing server, but still the warning persisted.
Curiously, I could see from looking at the editor window that the editor appeared to be using styles from the file for which I was receiving the failure to load warning, which I verified by using an element inspector. I tweaked some of the styles, and reloaded the editor window to determine whether the editor was stuck using a cached version of editor-style.css, which it apparently was – none of my style tweaks showed up, even after a hard refresh.
At this point I tried opening an edit window with Firefox instead of Chrome and did not get an error message. I went back to chrome, and confirmed that I was still seeing an error even after more hard refreshes.
Apparently a hard refresh (control refresh) doesn’t force Chrome to reload css files, so I used ‘more tools’ – ‘Clear browsing data’ from chome’s menu to clear ‘Cached image and files.’ After doing that I no longer see a warning message using Chrome.
The upshot is that if you have ever had a typo problem that caused the WordPress editor to issue a warning about failing to load a css file, the warning may be the result of a typo rather than the file actually failing to load from the server. Apparently Chrome aggressively caches css files, so just fixing typos will not correct the problem until you aggressively clear Chrome’s cache (or the cache of whatever web browser you are using…).
