Why style sheets
Eric Holstege (Eric_Holstege@broder.com)
Fri, 17 Jan 1997 12:06:01 -0800
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 12:06:01 -0800
Message-ID: <00001A25.1407@broder.com>
From: Eric_Holstege@broder.com (Eric Holstege)
Subject: Why style sheets
To: www-html@www10.w3.org
I understand all the arguments in favor of style sheets in terms of being able
to change the global look of an entire site in one place, but it seems to me
that I can do this with some intellignece about my markup conventions, and a
global search and replace.
Why should I pay the penalty of two HTTP accesses per page (one for the text,
another for the style sheet file) on *every page access*, when I can pay a
penalty for global search and replace only for every *style update*, which
happens much more infrequently. In the latter case I have to be a bit
intelligent about how I mark up my pages. In the former case I am in some sense
doubling the load on the network, my server, and my filesystem.
Also, why is it worse to add HTML tags or tag attributes than to add style
properties. There are well defined rules for ignoring unknown HTML tags and
attributes. Perhaps someone could explain.