Where should small amount of page specific style go?

[Mark Cunningham]

I am curious if there is something that would be considered a proper
method for locating small (three to four items) amounts of page specific
styling. Or does it really matter in the great scheme of things?

I have a linked style sheet that covers everything I want to do
globally. What should be done if I want to change and/or add a couple of
divs and paragraphs on a specific page and the style applied is specific
to that one page?

Should this be placed on a separate linked style sheet, placed in the
global style sheet (considering that I may be modifying something that
has already been declared like a paragraph), or would it be considered
ok to simply have this page specific styling on the web page itself
since it is specific to that one page?

Mark

[Stan Brown]

In article <3E************ @netscape.net> in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.stylesheets, Mark Cunningham
<ma*****@netsca pe.net> wrote:

I am curious if there is something that would be considered a proper
method for locating small (three to four items) amounts of page specific
styling. Or does it really matter in the great scheme of things?

I'm sure I'll have to dodge some brickbats, but if you have styles
that _really_ only apply to on document, I don't see great harm in
putting them in a <style> element.

However...

Even if today you're 100% certain that they will never apply to any
other document, I'll bet in a surprisingly short time you'll find
you do need them in a second document, and you'll wish they had been
in an external stylesheet all along. If their use is truly rare, you
could keep them in a special sheet, have that special sheet import
the main one, and then have your unusual document link to the
special sheet instead of the main one.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Stephen Poley]

On Sat, 28 Jun 2003 20:03:27 -0400, Stan Brown
<th************ @fastmail.fm> wrote:

In article <3E************ @netscape.net> in
comp.infosyste ms.www.authoring.stylesheets, Mark Cunningham
<ma*****@netsc ape.net> wrote:

I am curious if there is something that would be considered a proper
method for locating small (three to four items) amounts of page specific
styling. Or does it really matter in the great scheme of things?

I'm sure I'll have to dodge some brickbats, but if you have styles
that _really_ only apply to on document, I don't see great harm in
putting them in a <style> element.
Agreed - I often do that.
However...

Even if today you're 100% certain that they will never apply to any
other document, I'll bet in a surprisingly short time you'll find
you do need them in a second document, and you'll wish they had been
in an external stylesheet all along. If their use is truly rare, you
could keep them in a special sheet, have that special sheet import
the main one, and then have your unusual document link to the
special sheet instead of the main one.

On the other hand (a) if you have several pages with unique styles, that
introduces several extra files; (b) it's not that much work to move the
in-page styles to a separate stylesheet later if they become needed on a
second page.

Sometimes I use in-page styles for something like tweaking a margin
where, even if I did exactly the same thing on another page, I wouldn't
necessarily want a change to one page to affect other pages elsewhere.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

[Jacqui or (maybe) Pete]

In article <3E************ @netscape.net>, ma*****@netscap e.net says...

I am curious if there is something that would be considered a proper
method for locating small (three to four items) amounts of page specific
styling. Or does it really matter in the great scheme of things?

I have a linked style sheet that covers everything I want to do
globally. What should be done if I want to change and/or add a couple of
divs and paragraphs on a specific page and the style applied is specific
to that one page?

One option is to add an id to the body element of the specific page and
use eg :

#specialOne p {
... stuff specific to #specialOne page
}

Which makes life easy when you want to use that style in another page.

[Jim Dabell]

Mark Cunningham wrote:

I am curious if there is something that would be considered a proper
method for locating small (three to four items) amounts of page specific
styling. Or does it really matter in the great scheme of things?

It depends on how much of this you are expecting to do, and how visited the
pages are compared with the rest of the site. If there's just a few rules
here and there, then I'd just put them in the global stylesheet. It would
be a matter of 1K or so download for each visitor on the initial pageview,
and nothing from that point on, as opposed to a guaranteed 1K every time
somebody retrieves one of the pages from your server (the 1K is a complete
guess of course, but the principle holds, at least for small values).
--
Jim Dabell

[Matthias Gutfeldt]

Mark Cunningham schrieb:

I am curious if there is something that would be considered a proper
method for locating small (three to four items) amounts of page specific
styling. Or does it really matter in the great scheme of things?

I have a linked style sheet that covers everything I want to do
globally. What should be done if I want to change and/or add a couple of
divs and paragraphs on a specific page and the style applied is specific
to that one page?

Should this be placed on a separate linked style sheet, placed in the
global style sheet (considering that I may be modifying something that
has already been declared like a paragraph), or would it be considered
ok to simply have this page specific styling on the web page itself
since it is specific to that one page?

Most "page specific" styles turn out to be useful for other pages too,
while you'll find that some global styles really only apply to a few
pages. If you follow the route of "page-specific styles directly in the
web page", you could end up moving styles back and forth between
individual pages and the global stylesheet - time-intensive,
complicated, and error-prone.

And those page-specific styles in their individual page are usually
forgotten pretty soon; they'll rear their ugly head when you're updating
your global stylesheet and wonder about all the weird things that are
happening on some pages.

The same goes for linked stylesheets: You could end up with a css folder
full of different files that control some aspect of some pages but not
other aspects of some other pages - one big confusing mess.

That's why I usually suggest putting it all in one global stylesheet,
with lots of documentation to it. Properly organized sites can probably
risk separate linked stylesheets for separate sections of the site, but
even with good organization the potential for a big mess is just a
<link> away.

Whatever you do, try not to have too many different sources for the
final style rule - the cascade is a big pain in the tuckus, and
sometimes hard to understand for both authors and browsers.
Matthias

[Mark Cunningham]

Matthias Gutfeldt wrote:

Mark Cunningham schrieb:

I am curious if there is something that would be considered a proper
method for locating small (three to four items) amounts of page specific
styling. Or does it really matter in the great scheme of things?

I have a linked style sheet that covers everything I want to do
globally. What should be done if I want to change and/or add a couple of
divs and paragraphs on a specific page and the style applied is specific
to that one page?

Should this be placed on a separate linked style sheet, placed in the
global style sheet (considering that I may be modifying something that
has already been declared like a paragraph), or would it be considered
ok to simply have this page specific styling on the web page itself
since it is specific to that one page?

Most "page specific" styles turn out to be useful for other pages too,
while you'll find that some global styles really only apply to a few
pages. If you follow the route of "page-specific styles directly in the
web page", you could end up moving styles back and forth between
individual pages and the global stylesheet - time-intensive,
complicated, and error-prone.

And those page-specific styles in their individual page are usually
forgotten pretty soon; they'll rear their ugly head when you're updating
your global stylesheet and wonder about all the weird things that are
happening on some pages.

The same goes for linked stylesheets: You could end up with a css folder
full of different files that control some aspect of some pages but not
other aspects of some other pages - one big confusing mess.

That's why I usually suggest putting it all in one global stylesheet,
with lots of documentation to it. Properly organized sites can probably
risk separate linked stylesheets for separate sections of the site, but
even with good organization the potential for a big mess is just a
<link> away.

Whatever you do, try not to have too many different sources for the
final style rule - the cascade is a big pain in the tuckus, and
sometimes hard to understand for both authors and browsers.
Matthias

Matthias, Jim Dabell, Jacqui or (maybe) Pete, Stephen Poley, Stan Brown,
many thanks for taking the time to respond. It is greatly appreciated.
Sound advice and food for thought.

--

Mark Cunningham