Linked Style and the Cascade

Why Multiple Linked Style?

Linked style sheets are the holy grail of style, providing us with numerous benefits including improved document management and workflow. When we place our styles in an external style sheet, we have to go one place to make changes to our style, then save the .css document and sit back and relax while every document linked to that style sheet – even if it’s a million or more documents – updates to those styles.

Without this benefit, we’d have to go into the individual hard-coded pages and make the changes which would be extremely time-consuming and not at all cost-effective, not to mention tedious. Another option would be to perform a mass search and replace. More efficient perhaps, but the risk of introducing errors into pages with that technique is increased meaning stuff on your site might break. We’re back to frustration and wasting our precious time.

Given the benefit of one linked style sheet, why would using more than one be beneficial? It depends on the case scenario in point. For some sites, one style sheet is going to be sufficient to manage all the layout and style needs. However, on certain types of sites, using multiple sheets becomes a brilliant means of extending the document management benefits available.

Case in Point One: University

A great case in point as to when to use multiple styles comes about when we examine case scenarios based on real-world environments. Consider the following scenario. A major University is building a large web site. The University has determined that the site is to have a uniform layout, with the University logo in the upper left corner a navigation bar along the top horizontal area, and a news box to the left, with the full content area to the right (Figure 1).