[hinkley]

In a large app you often can’t easily find all of the html. It’s less work by far to ensure you can find all of the CSS though.

And when the company decides to rebrand and change the color scheme for the whole app, which they will at least half the time, you’ll be glad not to be playing whack-a-mole. Problems that aren’t done when you think they’re done create a lot of friction with the rest of the org. Open ended problems cause engineering to look incompetent. The cost of that problem is immeasurable, and doubly so in a bad economy.

[oneeyedpigeon]

> In a large app you often can’t easily find all of the html.

Which is often a warning sign of a bad design. The times I've dealt with systems that bury a certain piece of text in either a content file or a template or the database...

> It’s less work by far to ensure you can find all of the CSS though.

Hmm... depends. I've seen things like React embedding the CSS directly in with the markup and component logic etc. So this hasn't necessarily gotten any better — in fact, a site consisting JUST of html files would probably be easier to find CSS in even if it's all added via inline style attributes.

[hinkley]

There are no clean designs on a large team. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Zealots provide solutions that cannot possibly survive contact with actual humans. The rest of the team talks about them behind their backs.

> I've seen things like React embedding the CSS directly in with the markup and component logic etc.

You were talking about bad designs? Embedded styling is not Cascading Style Sheets. It’s embedded styling. There’s no sheet, and no cascade.

Nothing is free, and few things are easy. There are lines that are easier to maintain in practice than others, and separation of CSS is one of the former.

[oneeyedpigeon]

> Embedded styling is not Cascading Style Sheets

I think that's needless pedantry; the contents of the `style` attribute still needs to be valid CSS.

[hinkley]

It’s not needless pedantry. Calling it CSS is using a crescent wrench as a hammer and calling it a hammer (a running joke on r/tools). You’ve missed the entire point and someone needs to remind you - and everyone listening in - what the point was.

We had in-line style before we had CSS. We are going back and nobody remembers why we’ve had CSS for twenty years? Read some history.

[oneeyedpigeon]

We're not in 2003, though. If you're working on a project with somebody and you insist they refrain from calling the contents of a style attribute CSS because it wasn't always technically CSS, nobody will thank you.

Edit: actually, even when I was working with CSS in 2003 (IIRC, we absolutely were using separate CSS files then), this attitude would have been unhelpful, to say the least.