I never gave it much thought till just the other day. I think for simple text, embedded is ideal. Anything more complex should be linked to a style sheet. Or course, keeping the CSS in its own file keeps everything nice and tidy.

What does everyone think?

ideally everything should be linked - there's hardly ever an instance i use inline stlying - maybe if i want just one item in a whole site with high specificity then i might do it... but it's good practice to put everything in an external stylesheet

Always, always linked, the point of CSS is to seperate out the content from the layout and styling. This way you only have to ever change one document. If it's inline, you've got to go through every page and make the changes.

Plus, and perhaps most importantly, linked CSS leads to smaller page sizes, which is better for the user as they load faster.

I'm actually leaning toward a combination of the two. Almost everything is linked, but if there is an element that will only be used for a specific page, I embed the required style in that page. Finally if there's something that only appears once on a page, I use the html formatting codes at the line level.

Linked makes sure my entire website follows the same styles and layouts throughout all the pages.

Embedded allows me to have a few special styles for one specific web page, so I don't have to invent new names for seldom used styles.

Line level allows me to create very specific exceptions when needed for emphasis.

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Right now I'm just starting to learn css, so I don't have any good examples. Hopefully I'll have something online in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for your replies!

I guess I forgot to mention that I typically create 1-page mini sites so everything is sorta right there in front of me. I can see though that if I had a 5-page site (or more) it would be a real pain to make formatting changes.

Speaking of linked, I was watching a video tutorial where the person was calling in image (if I remember right). The weird thing was, he was linking to it with the absolute path and was including the http:// string. I don't know if he was doing it to keep it as simple as he could for beginners or something. My impression was that if you use an http absolute path it makes another call to the server thus increasing the load.

but if there is an element that will only be used for a specific page, I embed the required style in that page.

You still shouldn't put the styles in-line. Use a span with a class and put the class in the external CSS file if you have this situation.

Embedded vs Linked depends on your traffic.

If you have really high bounce rates (most users only see one page) then go embedded. If most users visit several pages, then go linked.

Regarding Ed Gray's comment, if embedding, be sure to use whatever your server's version of an include or template is (personally I use Sitemesh). Don't edit every page, ever.

As LadynRed stated, avoid inline styles.

Ideally the only time you should use inline styles are if they are dynamically generated with javascript to produce some kind of effect; other than that, link it all; it's possible and after a while it's not more annoying, in fact you find out it's actually easier and makes more sense!