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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-16T02:49:15+00:00

First, I am going to say this is only an issue on Android 2

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First, I am going to say this is only an issue on Android 2 and older (4 seems to be unaffected and I didn’t test 3).

I have a WebView that loads html from a string. The HTML looks like this:

<html>  
    <head>
        <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='http://www.robotsidekick.com/test.css?rev=0' />
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello World</h1>
    </body>
</html>

You can see that css file looks like this:

body {
    font-family: "Lucida Console", "Lucida Sans Typewriter", Monaco, "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", monospace;
}
h1 {
    border-bottom: 3px solid #ccc;
}

The WebView code looks like this:

final WebView webview = new WebView(this);
setContentView(webview);
final String result = "<html><head><link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='http://www.robotsidekick.com/test.css?rev=0' /></head><body><h1>Hello World</h1></body></html>";
webview.loadData(result, "text/html", Encoding.UTF_8.toString());

What Happens

I see the html code in the WebView as if I had set the mime type to plain text.

what happens html as plain text

What I’d Expect (and what happens in Android 4.x

I see the html in the WebView

There are a few things that have to be true to show the symptoms I am seeing:

  • Android 2.x (I was using 2.3.7 and 2.2)
  • The css has to be accessed via a url href="http://www.robotsidekick.com/test.css?rev=0" as opposed to href="test.css" (however it doesn’t matter if it’s a real css file href="http://www.thisisnotarealurl.fake/test.css?rev=0 causes the same problem)
  • The css must have a get parameter ?rev=0, but it doesn’t matter what it is

Also wanted to note that the following did not make a difference:

  • Using the appropriate " instead of ' in the HTML
  • Having the link tag close itself or not
  • The contents of the css
  • Adding a doctype <!DOCTYPE html> to the HTML
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Changing the webview.loadData line to this:

    webview.loadData(URLEncoder.encode(result).replaceAll("\\+", " "), "text/html", Encoding.UTF_8.toString());

    Solves this problem. It seems weird to me that a relative path with an unencoded ? doesn’t cause problems, while a fake url with an unencoded ? does cause problems.

    Also find it odd that the WebView changed enough in subsequent versions of Android that we don’t have to go encoding our html anymore? That sounds fishy.

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