Comments on: Are inline styles bad?

By: Ara

Ara — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 05:10:30 +0000

WD & Luke: There are definitely advantages to physically separating the CSS into a different file. Bandwidth usage and ease of maintenance are at the top of the list of reasons for doing so. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for it. I just wrote the comment/post because I was having a bit of a hard time with the whole idea that the style attribute was being treated as though it were “evil”–so to speak.

By: Luke

Luke — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 18:41:17 +0000

I agree, sometimes inline styles are ok. But their use should be limited to specific things. Before you use an inline style, it makes sense to ask yourself these questions:

1. If I need to redesign this website tomorrow, will my inline styles become an issue?

2. How easy is to track down and modify my inlines?

3. How many times does a style attribute appears on a given page on average?

For example, it’s probably ok to you define page specific css in a big style block at the top of your page, along with appropriate comments.

It’s probably a bad practice to add a style attribute to every individual div or span tag.

Similarly it probably makes more sense to use a dedicated css file per location, rather than copy and paste the same location specific inline css on every page. This way you end up maintaining 4-5 css files, rather than 40-50 html pages.

But yes, it all depends on the situation and if inline css is more appropriate then that’s what should be used.

By: WD Milner

WD Milner — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 18:30:21 +0000

Inline styles are useful for testing, or for something specific - maybe a late or temporary addition to a page but for general use I personally would avoid them.

Not only is it efficient to group CSS in files, but it also enables the browser to cache the stylesheet so it needn’t be downloaded each time (unless a page specifically loads a previously unused stylesheet). Inline styles, on the other hand, will swell the size of the main document file considerably, and will need to be downloaded with each page, even if they are duplicated from page to page.

While this extra ‘bloat’ may not be a problem with a small page, it can significantly impact laod times, especially for those without broadband connections.

Note that approx. 40-50% of US internet users do not have broadband and this climbs to 100% in some parts of the world. The last global average I recall seeing was that 70-80% of worldwide internet users were still using dial-up. Only about 15-20% of the worlds population are actually internet users.

Of course in all such consideration has to be the intended audience for the site.