Re: <style> in the <head> or in the <body> ?

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Thu, 4 May 95 09:51:05 EDT

>> are there any other pros to putting <style> in the head instead of in
>> the body? what about the cons?
>
>There are two types of HEAD elements: STYLE and LINK. You have a good
>collection of pro's, but not all arguments are valid for both. One con
>is that many current browsers will display the content of unknown
>HEAD elements.

The other con is that you are directly including the style information
into the document (even if in a somewhat controlled manner). I think
it woul be far, far better to have style information be completely
external to the HTML because:

1) It easily allows multiple "views" of a document (ie. you can have a
large text view and a small text view).
2) It will remove stylesheets from the HTML specification
entirely. They really are a separate issue.
3) It will ease development of both stylesheet languages and HTML,
because development can take place separately.
4) With no style information in the HTML, the data is more easily
reusable and far less application dependent (though I admit, CLASS
and <style> limit the overall effects a lot).
5) If the style information is separated out, there is a very large
chance that stylesheets will either be cached, or a local set will
be used, thereby reducing network resource consumtion.

There are probably other benefits I've missed.