CSS Options

One thing I have been thinking a lot about lately has been the multitude of ways that CSS can be applied to a document. You can have inline styles, you can have style elements in your page, you can have external style sheets, you can have styles applied by ID, styles applied by classname, styles applied by tag. Every web developer I talk to has a different preference for how to do things. Some will use different techniques depending on the situation, and some will always follow a rule based on standards or personal preference.

This is all well and good. CSS allows a lot of flexibility. I respect that. But how do you have an interface that allows people to efficiently direct a designer to generate CSS like this? This is the next challenge for web development tools to handle.

In my comments to my first post I asked a respondent what he thought of a feature that would move inline styles off of tags and it sounds like for that person it would be something he wanted. But would this be something everybody would want? When I think about what I would like to have for managing styles it seems like a good idea.

Whidbey generates a lot of CSS when you use the designer. This is a good thing, and an improvement over VS.NET 2003. No more font tags! It will be interesting to hear about how people will arrange all this CSS that the tool will generate for them.