Leading with htmlText inside a css style

I have the following line of code inside a css document that I am using in a flex project. All of our text is htmlText and we want to apply the code inside CSS so that all instances of the text will have the same leading (would like to avoid using textformat tag, which seems to work, but lots more markup):

leading:6px;

as soon as we put that one line of code into any of our styles in css, the entire flash document fails to load any styles. So no text shows up. Is there anything I should know about CSS and leading inside Flex projects? Is there a trick to get leading to be recognized? TIA :rabbit: