I don't normally care about hiding source code but I have a client that I want to show how their website will look and I don't want to give away the code...so being new at this I thought that I could create the css file on the fly and after the html has been output then write over the css file. It sounds good but isn't working. Is there some fundamental thing about css files and html pages that I am missing???

just get the style of the website and make a new .CSS and put the code then in your HTML template/website include the css file.

A bit of DOM scripting to the rescue

<script type="text/javascript" src="css.js"></script>

css.js

var cssFile = document.createElement('link');
cssFile.type = 'text/css';
cssFile.rel = 'stylesheet';
cssFile.href = '/test.css';
cssFile.media = 'screen';
cssFile.title = 'dynamicLoadedSheet';
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(cssFile); 

set the name of the stylesheet to suit. Maybe change the name of the js file as well.
It won't stop anybody who is determined to steal the design but it will stop the casual onlooker.
Or you could DOM script the entire style sheet though that would take a lot of work.

continuing what xkaosx said, you could take the style, and then put it in a file called "style.css", continuing on and putting it in a URL which has hotlink protection enabled (via .htaccess) and then adding in the following code where the <style type> should be.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.yoursite.com/style.css" />

how about just showing them a screenshot??

LOL!

Anyway, not sure why you'd want to do this, but I would have suggested the non hot-linking option, much easier if you have cPanel too, no matter how much some people hate it.

Thanks for the suggestions. I ended up getting what I was doing to work but it was much more work than what was suggested here so I think I will try a couple of your methods before I even think about using my method again.

a full sized screen shot is the best way to show what a would page look like. It's always good to have your own "intranet" if you wanna show functionabilities of what you can do to customers. (like create a fake teacher/course/classroom manager with reports, add/edit/delete, etc.. and let them play with it.)

if you're going to actually visit your client then take a local copy of the site on a laptop so they can see. if not then a screen shot should do