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Best Practice—Using External Style Sheets Instead of Local Formatting

When you format your topics to make them look the way you want, you can do so in a couple of different ways:

Use local formatting.Local formatting is a way to change the look and feel of content directly so that the changes are applied only to that specific content (as opposed to applying the changes throughout your project via the use of styles). Many easy-to-use tools are provided for editing and formatting topics locally in the XML Editor to give them the look and feel you want, without having to know XML at all. Simply open the topic that you want to format, and use the tool that suits your needs best. Local formatting (sometimes called "inline" formatting) can be very attractive because it is quick and easy. However, it is recommended that you use styles instead of local formatting whenever possible. Although local formatting is very convenient in the short-term, using styles is much more efficient and can save you a great deal of time in the long-term. See Local Formatting.
Use external style sheets to format topics (recommended). Styles are elements that contain formatting settings. You can apply styles to your content to change the way it looks. Flare works with cascading style sheet (CSS) rules that are specified by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C (http://www.w3.org). Using external style sheets instead of local formatting helps you work faster, more efficiently, and with more consistency in your topics. If you need to make changes to the formatting in the future, you do not need to change the formatting in each topic (as you would with direct formatting). Instead, you only need to change the formatting properties for that style in the appropriate style sheet. In Flare, you can create and use style sheets at the topic level, as well as at the table level. See About Styles and Style Sheets.