Well, in a perfect world, we could guarantee that the separate CSS file is accessible and life is good. Unfortunately, since we can't guarantee the CSS file is there, we decided to embed the CSS inside the HTML.
If you can guarantee the HTML is there, you can guarantee that the CSS is there. If the CSS is missing, it shouldn't "break" the usability of the HTML document.
It bloats it somewhat, but it is still smaller than the obligatory PG header information, so I don't feel TOO badly about it. And now we get a fully self-contained file.
I don't understand the correlation. What does your CSS size have to do with the obligatory PG header size?
Now that I think about it, you may be right... In Firefox (which is what I have on this machine), there is no View -> Use Style menu option, but there is the icon in the bottom left corner. *shrug*
For those that want to see this in a much-more expanded version, go to http://w3.org/Style/ in a Gecko-based browser, and click on the icon, or go to View -> Use Style, and try the various stylesheets listed there.
I have a big aversion to taking an electronic document and presenting it as "pages." First and foremost, it is ugly.
I submit that having page numbers in an unintuitive place (left-side margins, which doesn't appear in any printed work I can find), is just as ugly.
Second, it is going to wreck havoc whenever the user wants to change font sizes, page sizes, etc.
Having the border at the bottom of page 423 with a font size of 1.0em is still going to put the border at the bottom of the page when the font is 2.8em. I think I'm missing your allegory here. Can you explain? David A. Desrosiers desrod@gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com