My pages don’t suffer any slow down even when tested on a slow connection.

External objects should be kept to a minimum especially when they are big files.

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

I agree with your style sheet separation/organization. I’m currently working on a site with two other individuals. If we were all three inserting code into the same style sheet, the whole file would become cluttered and unorganized. So, during the construction progress, we have our own separate style sheet that we work in to keep everything organized. This keeps confusion down between the three of us, as we know what page each other is working in, and we are able to determine what style sheet the problem lies in, instead of scrolling through one big file searching for the problematic code.

I just wanted to clarify one point:

Though I think having a few css files to keep your code clean is smart web design. I think that you ought to not go crazy and have 10-20 CSS files. Try keeping it under 5.

As usual, always test to see what happens.

Stefan

This is true.

It also true that if you have no sugar in your coffee, it will save you a few calories when you go to McDonalds.

That said, css files are still not very relevant compared to other things (images, flash movies) in a web page, when it comes to saving bandwidth and download times.

That is the core of my argument:

compressing code is not where the big gains are in terms of download speed. Furthermore it is also better to have cleaner, easy to organize code, than faster code.

Case in point: killersites.com’s home page. I use 4 css files and according to external measures, the site loads faster than 70% of websites on the Web.

To respond to your ‘Benchmark it and come back to me.’ comment I recommend the following article:

http://www.die.net/musings/page_load_time/

I can’t claim credit for it myself, but it’s very well researched and provides some extremely useful information. Most notably (for this discussion) the following finding on improving page load performance:

‘Load fewer external objects. Due to request overhead, one bigger file just loads faster than two smaller ones half its size.’

I wholeheartedly agree that CSS separation like you suggest can be extremely helpful to the developer but to claim that many files will perform in the same manner as a single one equalling the same total size is simply a falsehood.

Interesting comments with regards to your own personal experiences.

… I prefer debate based on fact than on dogma.

Anyway, your point has merit and I think that it is probably suitable for many projects. In the end, how you go about creating those distinct chunks of code, is up to you and how you like to work.

I just wanted to push forth the idea of creating those manageable chunks.

That said, I’ve found a separate CSS files very handy in my work-flow.

Another use of an separate CSS file would be to place experimental CSS code. This way, if you wanted to rollback to a previous working version, you need only delete whatever you have in the experimental style sheet, knowing that your original code is safe and sound in the core style sheets.

I did this a wile and I constantly found myself searching for the right css rules in the files. So I went back to one file an startet using comments to separate blocks of rules (a.e. for one page).
There is an interesting idea of using javadoc style comment for css files: http://phpugffm.de/index.php/javadoc-for-css,2007-05,204.html

To avoid scrolling I use shortcuts at the bigging of each section like this “=L” for common link styles. So I can use the search functionality of my editor to find the blocks quickly.

Because I don’t like scrolling too much.

The whole notion that two extra css files are going to have any real impact on a web server is a little silly. Especially since the files are actually downloaded once and then are stored in cache.

Stefan

You’re really correct…

I liked this separation. But… why not do this “separation” into a single file commented?!

The server hits important, and a dedicated developer should consider it. This is much important, specially in greater sites with heavy accessed. This is better for users and to company.

But, anyway, this theory of organize code is good. A good idea for the chaos of coding! Only the use of many files must be better considered.