Why style sheets

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.

Received on Friday, 17 January 1997 15:09:28 UTC