Project Milestone – Week 4

This week’s project milestone is to start adding content to the site. We are to include appropriate typography, colors, and imagery as per our lecture and lab assignments. The course project instructions also encourage us to implement the box model through the use of <div> tags and absolute positioning and to use inline and embedded where appropriate.

External vs. Embedded vs. Inline CSS

The end of the last sentence above makes myself question, why would you use anything but external (linked) styling sheets? I’m no expert at this point, but inline doesn’t seem very practical at all. First of all it could get lost in all of the HTML if you have a considerable amount of content created. Secondly, inline CSS will affect only a very specific element, and so if you’re using a combination of external and inline or even embedded and inline, you could intend on styling a section a certain way but your existing inline CSS won’t allow it. My conclusion is that inline CSS might have a rare use case but otherwise I will simply avoid it. So what about embedded? I feel it’s downside is that it only affects one of your pages. So at a later time post site creation, when you decide you want to change a color scheme or something like that , you will have to change it on all of your site’s pages. Embedded does have a very good benefit though and that is there are no additional pages to download when the site is ran. This helps with performance and download speed of your site. Ultimately, external CSS will be most heavily used when I create sites. The small hit to performance is OK and negligible in my opinion and the upside is that it makes management of the site so much easier.

Please share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below. I’m curious to see if the majority agrees with me or if there are pros/cons that I haven’t thought of.