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

Lou Montulli (montulli@netscape.com)
Thu, 4 May 95 15:54:38 EDT

On May 4, 9:50am, Gavin Nicol wrote:
> Subject: Re: <style> in the <head> or in the <body> ?
> >> 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).

Which can still be done with <STYLE>

> 2) It will remove stylesheets from the HTML specification
> entirely. They really are a separate issue.

They can never be a separate issue. If there is ever to be
a common standard it needs to be specified. There is no
way that browsers are going to interpret 5 different types
of style sheets.

> 3) It will ease development of both stylesheet languages and HTML,
> because development can take place separately.

How? Stylesheet parsing has to go into HTML parsing engines.
Whats the use of parsing a stylesheet if your never going
to apply the style to HTML?

> 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).

Not true. Style information is easily ignored or extracted.

> 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.

And in the cases where the style sheet only ever applies to one document
you waste a tremendous amount of resources by forcing a separate net
connection.

-- 
Lou Montulli                 http://www.mcom.com/people/montulli/
       Netscape Communications Corp.