Re: 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.

Actually, you will have more load if you put all the style info in
the HTML documents. You would have to repeat it over and over again.
If you have something which applies to paragraphs, you need to repeat
that style info for each paragraph.

With a style sheet, you send out the style sheets once; any further
documents using the same style sheet won't need to get the style
sheet again, it will (usually) be cached by the client or a proxy.

Furthermore, the size of a style sheets is often much, much less 
smaller than a graphic.



Abigail

Received on Sunday, 19 January 1997 23:36:40 UTC