Question

I’m doing practice with CakePHP and just wonder to know if it’s logical/right thing to place CSS portions dedicated to the template view only.

I’m talking about thing like this:

<style>
    .form-element-name {
        width:150px;
        /* colors and other stuff are placed in main css */
    }
</style>
<form>
    <div class="form-element-name">Username</div><input name="myuser"/>
    <div class="form-element-name">Password</div><input name="mypass"/>
    <etc.../>
</form>

Answer 1

The cake way of doing this is to do a call to the HTML-Helper like this:

<?php echo $this->Html->css('forms'); ?>

The file has to be in the /app/webroot/css folder for this to work. The extension .css is not needed as the helper adds it automatically.
Don’t forget to add the HTML-Helper to your controller var $helpers = array('Html');

If you do it this way you can keep the layout and the content logically separated, which I would call good practice.

Also have a look on the CakeBook for more information about the HTML-Helper.