Martin Heiden wrote: > If you have too many rules, you can add page level external css-files.
Personally, I cannot see the purpose in having page-level external files in addition to shared group-wide or site-wide files, except for one thing: media types. If you link to external style sheets you can reliably use media types. If media type is not an issue in the situation, I would put the page-specific rules into the head of the document. This is quite appropriate within the intent of CSS, in my opinion, and makes finding the relevant CSS much easier. You should only use external CSS when the rules are for sharing with other pages, IMHO. Otherwise you are adding inconvenience without gaining any corresponding benefit, and it means an extra server hit for each page viewed - completely contrary to all the normal advantages of using external files. Keeping the rules within the document allows you to use sensible global naming conventions within each page like... #content ...and provide unique layout values without needing to apply unique IDs to the BODY tag or similar strategies, which can be a real pain in the butt to administer across large sites. Another reason to be careful about over-centralising CSS is testing: we had a situation on a very large corporate JSP-based site where the whole site was being made-over to a new look across several months. Chunks went through unit and functional testing and were then staged for final production use. Before we realised the risks, we had a couple of situations where later changes to the shared CSS caused layout of pages that had already been through testing to break. This was extremely serious, because testing was about 40% of the work on each page, and retesting everything would have added weeks or months to the project. We had to split CSS up so that each chunk that went through testing would not be affected by later changes to the CSS, but within these chunks you could still have problems. CSS seems to be almost unique in introducing risks on this scale on large workflows. HTH Cheers Ian PS - I second the sentiment of others that if you have thousands of lines of CSS in any single file, something has gone wrong almost by definition. -- _________________________________________________ zStudio - Web development and accessibility http://zStudio.co.uk Snippetz.net - Online code library File, manage and re-use your code snippets & links http://snippetz.net ______________________________________________________________________ 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/
