[adamlett]

The gospel of separating styling from content comes from an era when most web sites were comprised of collections of hand crafted HTML documents, when it was a pain to make site wide changes to styling because it meant updating each of these documents by hand.

These days web sites are mostly comprised of HTML pages rendered on the fly by some type of web app which composes pages from nested templates injected with content from a database. In this scenario separating the styling from the markup gains us little, because to change the styling site wide you only have to update a few templates, not every single page that uses these templates.