the hacker (there's too many davids running around here) said:

If you have a lot of texts, putting the stylesheet directly inside the HTML unnecessarily bloats the content, and removes one of the main benefits of CSS.. being able to separate content from presentation. This means that if you have 1,500 works all formatted with an internal stylesheet, and you want to change the fonts for one class and add some borders around another, and add a selector for a new text class... you have to modify 1,500 stylesheets, insteasd of one. Yes, you could do all of that with a single perl one-liner, but why should you?

sometimes people act like c.s.s. is some magic new technology. in reality, it's just a stylesheet. and this trade-off between "one stylesheet for all your documents" versus "one for each" is a well-known dilemma to anyone who has used stylesheets. (my virginity in that arena went to ventura publisher in 1989.) the upshot is that each method has benefits and shortcomings, and you can only really make an informed decision relevant to your particular situation when you know all of them full-on. i look forward to the learning process -- over the next 5 years? -- as this comes to be appreciated by the c.s.s. community at large, and relish the time of its culmination, when we can start to make some real progress, instead of just re-grasping old knowledge... -bowerbird