> Your quote chopped off the asterisk after HTML

No, there was (and still is) no asterisk in the title of this post.

Firefox doesn't even give me the option to view page source, only selection source. Doing that gives me this:

    <html><head><link rel="stylesheet"
    href="pure_css_digital_clock.css">
    </head><body></body></html>

The inspector works fine, but the inspector also does not present the HTML as it was sent, but rather the DOM that Firefox is rendering.

None of this is important, it's just fun to poke at these CSS demos a little and see how the browser acts.

Well, no, there's a bit more to it than that:

  <html>
   <head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="pure_css_digital_clock.css">
   </head>
   <body></body>
  </html>

Indeed the the CSS defines styles for the <body> element. So this whole thing would not be possible there was no HTML (or some structured document representation). See, the part about lack of HTML in the title is completely unnecessary.

Right. For Firefox, I can even remove that line and set the stylesheet using a `Link:` header. Unfortunately, that feature isn't widely adopted by other browsers.