[pornel]

Inline CSS isn't any more awful than any other meaningless presentational markup.

Why use inline CSS? Because it's simpler and obvious. The proposed hack has no upsides: it isn't any more accessible, isn't any more maintainable, and it isn't any more performant (quite the opposite).

To me it's in the same category as replacing `<font color=red>` with `<span class=red>`, because "font is bad".

[Arnt]

The proposed hack has the upside that all of the bar charts on a site are governed by the same CSS.

The CSS is ugly because of the many redundant rules. But if you have x bar charts on y pages, then one ugly CSS file is better than x repeated ugly spots spread out in y HTML files.

[pornel]

Inline style for bar height doesn't preclude use of external styles for common properties like color, borders, etc.

Also it's very unlikely you'd have many charts with markup written by hand. I'd expect charts to be generated from a template from a proper data source, so change in markup of all charts would still be done in one place.

[sova]

tru.