Sorry about the sensationalist subject line. I couldn't resist. For the past six months I've been building a massive, consumer Web application. I took over the development from a guy who was keen on standards-compliant XHTML (yay!) and keeping every style rule in an external CSS document (kinda yay). This worked great up until I hit line 6000 of the external CSS doc and Dreamweaver started choking a little each time I saved.
Then I began grouping pages of the site into sections and creating CSS docs for each section. This helped, because a lot of rules could be taken out of the main doc and put into a smaller doc. (The server gzips all outgoing CSS docs, so even with 6000 lines, the file size for transmission is only about 10-15k.) Now, the wonderful thing about this app is that it has dozens of pages with unique designs. Each of these unique designs requires many elements to be positioned, floated, padded, margined, bordered or backgrounded uniquely. This has contributed in no small way to the 10,000+ lines of CSS rules for this app. Now, when a product manager points to an element on a page and says, "I'd like you to move that box a little closer to the one above it," I first have to open the HTML (actually .JSP) file, find the element in question, grab the class name, then open the associated CSS doc, search for the class name and finally make the change. (And of course, the requests are seldom so simple, which means the fixes tend to involve a lot more scrolling around inside a multi-thousand-line doc looking for a CSS value.) I've been putting these positioning rules into the external CSS dogmatically since taking over this job, and also because nearly every place you look you see people extolling the virtues of separating style from content. Yes, yes.It's a great idea. Particularly effective when you have a fairly simple set of page designs and a lot of content to flow into them. But when you have an app with over a hundred pages, most having unique designs and very little content, positioning elements inline is a huge time-saver. One of the big benefits of separating style rules from content is the ease of making site-wide changes with minimal effort. Another benefit I can see is having an app that's ready to be ported to handheld, or other medium. But in the case of this app, site-wide changes can only really affect colors and fonts, since there are so many unique design structures throughout. And since there are no plans to port this to handheld, that argument loses its strength. So my current consideration is to move the specific positioning information back into inline styling. Positioning that is repeated frequently on one page will be moved to the header (internal). And, naturally, globally-used styles will remain in the blessed external CSS docs. If you've made it this far into the e-mail, thanks. I'd love to hear any counter arguments to this desire for regression. I've heard rumors that inline styles will be deprecated in future versions of XTHML. If true, that would give me pause. I've tried so many times to set up site-wide standards for the use of fully-external CSS in this app, but its complexity has made doing so mind-numbingly difficult. -Troy ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d IE7b2 testing hub -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=IE7 List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
