Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#1

Post by TicklishTiger » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

I just googled for 'cloud hosting' and landed here:

https://try.digitalocean.com/cloud-hosting/

I'm often curious how the source of a page looks like. So I inspected the headline "Cloud hosting developers love.".

This is what I found:

Cloud hosting
developers love. 

I find this kind of crazy inline styling and absurd choice of elements pretty often these days. Why? What is going on?

Re: Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#2

Post by pesfandiar » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

Most likely the product of server-side automated styling.

Re: Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#3

Post by Khelavaster » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

From a WYSIWIG editor or the result of manual PSD2HTML conversion.

Re: Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#4

Post by LarryMade2 » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

Might be for use on web and email advertisements where inline styling is a necessity.

Re: Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#5

Post by craftoman » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

Seems like it was generated by some kind of a WYSIWYG editor or maybe it's just another simple obfuscating tool designed for simple scrappers.

Re: Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#6

Post by hrbrmstr » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

That particular page appears to have been created with "Unbounce" (https://preview.unbounce.com/) (the "lp-*" strings give that away). If you look for said "lp-" strings on the web there are more than a few pages using them. Unbounce is primarily designed for creating HTML email that won't break and won't get auto-rejected and it's likely easier for the builder program to stick in hardcoded values in-tag than to rely on complex CSS, especially with the varied capabilities of mail clients.

Re: Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#7

Post by soneca » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

It is a good practice for static pages focused on performance (e.g. landing pages like this one) that the critical CSS is inline. It is common that all CSS for above the folder content is inline - usually done through a processor, so the development code is kept sane.

A kind of old, but relevant source: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/Priori...

Re: Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#8

Post by notahacker » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

Inlining of "critical" css is favoured for page load speed, but not like that...

Re: Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#9

Post by iceninenines » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

It looks generated but not minified. If performance were a concern, they'd minify it, i.e., strip out unnecessary whitespace, punctuation and rename ids/classes to some Huffman-encoded obsfucated replacements to make it look vaguely like Google's homepage

Re: Ask HN: Why do I see so much crazy inline styling on websites these days?

#10

Post by shoo » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 11:36 PM UTC

> crazy inline styling and absurd choice of elements pretty often these days

i'd be interested to hear what objectively measurable properties this way of doing things might suffer from. e.g.

  1. does it result in more data being sent over the wire?
  2. does it result in slower page load speed?
  3. is it less widely supported by browsers?
  4. is it harder to maintain?

It's a bit hard to assess if this is easy to maintain without knowing how the page is generated. Maybe it's built by some pipeline that is very easy for the developers to maintain & easy for people to tweak the styles...

(context: genuine interest, backend dev who has largely dodged having to care about html for the last n years...)