Internal or External Style Sheet?

[Big_Dave]

Not related to Actinic in particular but general web design.

Do you prefer to use an Internal Style Sheet or External? I've heard pros and cons for both.

I recently read of a few people switching from External to Internal because sometimes their webpages arrived before the formatting (which looked messy). Then the formatting kicks in a split second later and the site looks perfect.

I guess this is because an External style sheet needs to be accessed each time a page is displayed and the two actions may not always coincide? I have noticed a few sites myself jump about a bit after they have fully loaded.

Perhaps an Internal style sheet (present in the header of every page) would get rid of this problem but maybe slow the page loading times down?

Interested to hear any thoughts or experience.

[Mike Hughes]

I would tend to say an external style sheet is better because it only needs to be downloaded once. From then on it's in the PCs cache.

If you put the styling info on the page then it has to be downloaded every time there's a new page. This would slow verything down if it gets too large, but probably not a problem if it's just a few lines.

Mike

[Duncan Rounding]

Always external - otherwise it defeats the object in my opinion. A minor change in css style could mean a complete site upload if internal.

[leehack]

Internal styling negates one of the massive advantages of CSS in that you can make global changes. 50 page site, slight change needed to a style, prefer to open up one stylesheet or 50 separate pages? It's not even a close argument, external all the time.

Only time i go internal is on actinic when background image changes, dependant on which top level section you are in, that is it.

[pinbrook]

external for ease of management

[completerookie]

clever use of styles will dictate which sections of your pages are "painted" in what order.
the web pages need to be painted in a "top-down CODE order" so if you have your opening table with the navigation coded FIRST in the page, then thats what gets painted first. if the page then goes on to the contents, then thats what gets painted next.

with judicious use of styles, and putting things like

<div id="content">contents</div>
<div id="nav">contents of the navigation</div>

this will then paint the contents first, allowing the users to get on with reading the contents whilst the navigation finishes painting.

when it comes to internal/ external sheets, traditionally, external sheets will paint faster the second time around, but may paint slower the first time of being used.

personally, I always use external sheets, there is ONLY ONE place to maintain your styles.