Inline CSS

While the importance of sementical standards is always in mind of any developer taking care over the presentation of code, inline CSS often finds its way in, even when the most thorough of care is taken to avoid using it. But why does it matter?

The truth is, it doesn't really matter much at all, but a cleaner page is more optimised for loading time, so it makes sense to keep your code well groomed.

The preservation of sementic standards ultimately forces a standards concious developer to consistanly review and filter what is potentially messy or redundant code, and 90% of the time this is inline CSS which can be embedded and linked to an external style sheet.

Using an external stylesheet not only cleans up a scruffy looking page, it also enables the browser to cache it, allowing for quicker loading time, and ultimately speedier site navigation.

The only potential drawback affects those who employ black hat methods of spamming embedded stylesheets with keywords and phrases in their classes and ID's. However, this method will more often lead to undesirable rankings and penalisation due to spamming, and as such is not worth worrying about..

So, does the removal or use of inline CSS affect rankings? Probably not. Pages may be given credit for employing the lighter touch and being kept clean and tidy, and as a result may increase loading time.

Overall, using an external stylesheet is just best practise.