Question

This is my first expericne with WebDesign and I am designign a form with textboxes, labels, etc… and have a question: is it Ok to set hard coded width for these contorls? or I should everwhere use other techniques for example DIV and percentages on different DIVS?

Answer 1

External CSS files should be used whenever possible. The only exception I’ve seen to this is when JavaScript is involved, because it will set inline styles when modifying elements (which, there isn’t much you can do about, so it’s the exception).

Inline styles are frowned upon because

• It only affects that element, rendering it useless as soon as you have another element that needs that same style.
• It makes your code very hard to maintain, because you have to touch every file to make a change when everything’s inline.
• It defeats the purpose of the cascade part of cascading style sheets (inline styles always have higher priority than non-inline styles), and can lead to unexpected results when trying to change external styles and something isn’t changing as it should.
• Things like width=100px on most elements are deprecated or at least discouraged by the W3C.
• It violates separation of presentation and content.
• It leads to a lot of replication, which violates DRY principles.